The Climbing Way
by winter machine
Summary: In the wake of Derek's Christmas Eve confession, he and Addison are forced to start working through their differences for a common goal: her survival.  Set in Season 2, AU after 2x12.
1. Chapter 1

**Author's Notes: _This has been in my head for a while, and I'm in an AddisonAndDerek mood. This is a combination of prompts (thanks, Rach!). The story opens at the close of the Season 2 Christmas episode of Grey's (following Derek's confession to Addison that he fell in love with Meredith) and goes AU from there with some more exploration of how they got there and where they're going. If you decide to read, please let me know your thoughts - they're always welcome. I can't be the only one who still wants to read about these two crazy kids, can I? I plan to update as quickly as I can, though this chapter may be a bit longer than future endeavors._**

* * *

><p><strong>The Climbing Way<strong>

_O ye beneath life's crushing load,_  
><em>Whose forms are bending low, <em>  
><em>Who toil along the climbing way <em>  
><em>With painful steps and slow; <em>  
><em>Look now, for glad and golden hours <em>  
><em>Come swiftly on the wing; <em>  
><em>Oh rest beside the weary road <em>  
><em>And hear the angels sing.<em>

(Sears/Willis, "It Came Upon A Midnight Clear")

* * *

><p>"Dr. Shepherd?"<p>

"Yes, this is-"

"You're Addison Shepherd's husband."

"Yes." He swipes confusion and sleep from his eyes, fumbling for the clock. 4:52. The sky's a bruised black-purple outside the small windows. "Yes, what's-"

Then his mouth goes dry at the words on the other end of the phone.

"No, that's impossible, she's-" and he turns but the pillow beside him is empty, the covers flat and rumpled.

"I-she was here. She was sleeping-"

The voice on the other end of the line is gentle, sympathetic. He knows the tone too well. He's used it himself.

"I'm very sorry."

* * *

><p><strong><em>the night before<em>**

* * *

><p>She's on her fourth drink. Not a word has passed between them since his admission. They left comfortable silence behind in New York, long before Mark happened. But this silence is something else entirely: weighty. Sticky. Like the silly seasonal drink she was nursing when he arrived.<p>

He should be relieved that he's been able to be honest. In truth, though, he's not sure what he feels - if it's anything at all. Feelings aren't simple for him, they neither overwhelm nor underwhelm him. They are, like everything else in his life, subject to clinical analysis and study before he expresses them.

Extract, review, determine.

He leans against the stiff back of the booth and waits.

_I'm not saying this to hurt you..._

She drains the glass and signals to Joe. When he brings a fresh one he meets Derek's eyes with some emotion he can't identify - sympathy? Judgment? Derek nods briefly at him. Addison takes a long swallow and sets the glass down with little grace. A few drops slosh over the side; she switched to gin several drinks ago and he's not sure the combination is doing her any favors.

_...or because I want to leave you, because I don't._

He glances at her, uncertain of his next move, and sees that her eyes are bright with unshed tears. Her tolerance - for alcohol and other things - has always been high, but the set of her jaw is noticeably tight.

_Meredith - it wasn't a fling. It wasn't revenge. I fell in love with her._

He didn't say anything after her second drink, or even the fourth, deciding to give her some space, but-

_That doesn't go away just because I decided to stay with you._

"That's probably enough." He wraps his fingers around the cool cylinder of her glass and moves it carefully away from her. He waits for her to protest but she's looking past him.

"I want to go home," she whispers.

He'd braced himself for a scene, not agreement. He nods, pleased that they're on the same page and can leave the awkwardness of the too-small booth behind them. "Good. I'll drive." The single scotch he drank has long since been metabolized, he's been matching her glass for glass with water.

A tear rolls down her cheek and she jabs at it with the heel of her hand. "No. Not the...trailer. _Home._"

"Addison-"

She raises her voice. "I want to go home, Derek!"

Shit. He glances quickly over his shoulder, confirming they've drawn a few unwelcome stares.

"Okay, let's just-"

"I want to go home. I want to go back to New York." Another tear falls and he angles his body along the booth to try to shield her from view, knowing how little she would want to be seen in this state. Addison's not one for public crying; she's barely one for private crying. He realizes he should have cut her off earlier and kicks himself for it. He doesn't - can't - regret what he said, but the longer they sit here, the more he realizes how exposed they are.

Still blocking as much of her as possible, he rests a hand on her tweed-covered knee - she doesn't resist - and gentles his tone as much as he can. "Addison, we'll talk about this at h- after we leave. Come on, let's go."

"We'll _talk_ about this? Seriously? We don't talk about anything!" Her voice is shrill and he winces.

"Calm down. You're making a scene. This isn't the place to do this-"

"_You_ did it. This is _your_ scene."

"Enough." He pats her leg gingerly. "I'll get your coat."

She shakes her head. "I'm not going with you." Her voice is congested like it always gets when she cries, and it hitches on the last word. "I want to go home," she whispers again.

"Come on, Addie." He starts to stand to reach for their coats when her half-yell stops him

"I'm not going with you!"

"Okay. Okay." He drops back into the booth and she quiets down. The other customers are somewhere between uninterested and compelled to watch. Addison turns away from him, salvaging the drink he'd tried to take from her a few minutes before. She takes a long swig and sniffs, hard. There's a tinny Christmas carol playing on the aging speakers; a smell of old popcorn and wet wool in the air. He props his chin in his hand.

Now what?

It feels like hours before she speaks again. Her voice is hoarse with emotion. When did that tone start to grate on his nerves?

"I can't be here. I need to go back to New York. I'm going to get a - where's my phone?"

She fusses inside her oversized bags, movements clumsy and jerky.

"It's Christmas Eve. You're not going to get a ticket out."

"So I'll fly private."

"Addison-"

"Derek, what? _What? _You're in love with another woman. Isn't that what you said? So why shouldn't I go?"

"It's...Christmas," he says helplessly, and regrets it almost immediately when she turns on him, cheeks reddened with fury.

"_Don't you think I know it's Christmas?_"

He's given up worrying about the other patrons at Joe's. Neither of them has ordered anything in nearly an hour. Addison is half-horizontal in her seat, and he doesn't have to look down to see how tightly her heels are dug into the floor. She couldn't have made it any clearer that she's refusing to leave. And short of prying her fingers loose from the table and dragging her out of there by force, he has no idea how to effectuate this transition.

Reasoning with her has worked poorly so far. Then again, if they knew how to avoid ineffectual patterns, they might never have gotten to this point. So it's no surprise to him that he starts again, almost by rote.

"Come on, Addie. Let's go back to the trailer. Sleep it off-"

"No!"

He lowers his voice even more, hoping it will bring hers down. "If you really still want to leave in the morning, I won't stop you."

"Tonight. I want to leave tonight."

"Addison."

"I can't - " and she drops her head into her folded arms.

He resists a strong urge to bang his own head into the wooden back of the booth. He looks her over. Her red hair is everywhere, spilling across her arms and over the rather sticky surface of the table. In this position, her white sweater his ridden up, exposing a few inches of bare back between the hem and the waistband of her trousers. He wants to look away, but something about that strip of skin - which looks particularly vulnerable in the low yellow light of the bar - makes unwelcome images rise up in his mind. Kissing his way down her spine while she squirmed and laughed beneath him. Resting his hand at the dip of her back - uncovered by her wedding dress - as they danced. The rainbow shaped arc of her silhouette as her dive parted the smooth water.

He feels he should do something vaguely comforting. Resisting any unwise urge to touch the bare skin in front of him now, he rests his hand against the soft wool of her sweater instead. She stiffens under his fingers, but doesn't pull away. She's not drinking now and no one's looking, so he relaxes - very slightly, reaches past her, and with one hand still resting on her back takes a long swallow of her drink.

He definitely feels like he needs it.

She's quiet and after long minutes he wonders if she's fallen asleep. He touches her shoulder. No response.

"Addison?"

She ignores him.

He moves some of her hair away from her face to try to see her expression. He fails, but she draws away from his fingers and he can tell she's awake, at least. It's so like her, either completely together or mostly falling apart, and he feels he has limited time to get them out of the bar.

"Just come outside with me. Let's just get some air."

To his surprise she nods at this and with the same slow, jerky movements, begins to gather herself to her feet. He wonders if he should feel guilty that a lie is what got her moving - or not, since lies are what moved them out here in the first place. He drapes her coat over her shoulders and keeps an arm around her waist as they walk out, first to prevent her from doing anything rash as they leave and then just to support her, as she grows less and less steady as they walk.

She's still mumbling something and he leans closer to hear it.

"I'm going to leave tonight. I'll find a hotel. I'll-"

"Addison." He's having some trouble holding her up, her trench is damp and she's increasingly just dead weight against him. "It's Christmas Eve and you're not in any shape to travel anyway."

She makes a soft snorting noise, sounding disgusted. "Please. You don't care that it's Christmas, except that you couldn't bear to be the guy who made his wife leave on Christmas. You have to be the good guy who keeps her around, right, Derek?"

It hits him hard, an arrow between the eyes, like truth, but before he can process it she's slipped through his fingers and she's on her knees in the parking lot, back arcing with what look like painful spasms. He drops to his haunches beside her and pulls her long hair away from her face mechanically, seconds too late.

Her clothes are spattered - even her trench. She looks glassy eyed and miserable and a little corner he'd frozen away thaws, just slightly. He's never been good at resisting her when she's vulnerable; what he's learned, unfortunately, is that it's just another form of avoidance.

She's too tired, too drunk, or both to argue any further and he loads her into his car, turns up the heat - she's shivering - and the enclosed space is claustrophobic with exhaust and the sour stench of vomit.

_Christmas, Derek. We love Christmas._

It's too dark to see anything until the lights of a passing car illuminate her face. Then he sees how empty her eyes are.

_Or at least we used to._

She's quiet when they get inside, then turns to him with that peculiar double-take affectation she uses so often, half-stammering. He's never been sure whether she does it on purpose and this doesn't seem to be the time to ask.

"Christmas - Christmas makes you want to be with people you love. That's what you said."

He nods.

"Not including me."

"I didn't say that."

"So it does include me?"

He lowers his head. This feeling of being trapped in her sights is so familiar. "I didn't say that," he admits.

She covers her face with her hands, turning away, and despite the still-present stone of anger inside him he feels a spear of guilt as he observes her shaking shoulders. She used to cover her face with her hands whenever she cried - something about her parents and that achingly cold upbringing. It took ages before she'd cry openly; when they were first married, he would occasionally pry her hands away from her face himself, lacing her fingers with his and preventing her from hiding. It's something he feels, oddly, he could never do now - it's too intimate somehow.

Is it possible that after ten years he actually knows her _less_?

Her mother had told her it was inappropriate to cry anywhere outside of one's bedroom; he knows this. The trailer has no real bedroom demarcation, but he supposes it's close enough. He stands there, wondering what he should do, used to being more certain of the right choice to make. The right thing to do. All that certainty has faded now, and he wonders too if he hates her for it.

Struck with the thought that he can't really do anything for her, he crosses the limited space and turns on the shower, waiting predictably long moments for the water to warm up.

"Get in. You'll feel better."

She turns around at this, eyes wide and bloodshot. She's a mess and where he expects he should feel tenderness he can only access resignation and a weak sense of duty. Cautiously, he approaches her and she covers her face again.

"Don't talk to me." Her voice is muffled behind her hands.

"Addison..." the tone is more of an entreaty than he intended. "Come on, it's okay."

Her hands fly away from her face, her eyes redder than before. "If you say that again, Derek, so help me..."

He holds a hand up. "Calm down." He gestures at her ruined clothing. "Take those off and I'll put them outside."

She undresses slowly with her back half to him; he realizes each of them has turned slightly away from the other. Privacy. He used to love to watch her undress after work, the slow slide of stockings down her endless legs.

The trailer smells better with her clothes on the porch, and the pounding water from the shower is inexplicably soothing, almost as if it's raining down on his skin. He changes his clothes, sits on the side of the bed with his elbows on his knees and treasures the relative silence. The trailer was quiet, before. She's mostly moved in now; she's filled it with dresses and shoes, endless glass bottles of lotions and perfumes and makeup. And with noise: questions, some of them even spoken out loud. Accusations. Her presence fills it up; her long body runs head to foot in the bed, her hair comes close to brushing the ceiling at times. He trips over her things.

She stumbles out of the shower in a cloud of steam, interrupting his thoughts-

_She's always interrupting_

- and the smell of her shampoo is overpowering in the small space. He used to love the smell, love burying his face in her wet hair, nibbling at shower-damp skin.

Now he just takes the towel from her and rubs it through her hair. There's something left, but what? He wishes, not for the first time, that he could locate and name the sensations he feels. Affection? Perhaps. Pity? Maybe. She's shivering in a robe and he turns his back tactfully so she can change.

"I'll sleep on the couch."

How many times has he heard that before? It was often - just as it is now - a pretense. They had two guest bedrooms, not to mention - he tamps down the thought. And they also had a fully furnished office. But there was no huff quite like a sleeping-on-the-couch huff, so she seemed to prefer the drama of that: stalking down the wooden staircase, flopping on the oversized leather couch, and waiting for him to venture after her with a peace offering. Sometimes he'd sleep there with her, millimeters from her frosty shoulder as he drifted off. He'd usually wake with her molded to him, her cold toes mingled with his. In sleep she sought his heat.

The thin strip of couch in the trailer - if it can be called that - is mostly for show. She looks somewhere between defiant and pathetic, hair still wet and uncombed, eyes glassy, and he sighs.

"Addison." He rubs a weary hand through his hair. "A Christmas truce, please." She winces at the word _Christmas_, but he can sense her weakening and he wraps a hand around her arm, guiding her toward the bed.

She lies on her stomach as far away from him as possible, face pressed into the pillow. He's on his back, staring at the ceiling. Wind moves the tree branches outside.

He gets the distinct sense Christmas won't be her favorite holiday anymore.

He looks inside himself, tries to access guilt, but all he gets is that hard stone again. Resignation. Anger. Betrayal. It's still there - there are a lot of things ruined now. He counts them off as his eyes grow heavy: Flannel sheets. His bed. The thing they don't talk about. His best friend. His marriage, most likely. His old goddamned shirt she used to sleep in that looked so good on her, until - well, Christmas can just find its way to the list as well.

That's his last thought as sleep overtakes him.

* * *

><p><em>"I'm very sorry."<em>

"No, she was here." His hand skates down the empty half of the bed. "I don't know when she left, I-"

His voice is breathy, uncharacteristic to his own ears. Someone else has taken the phone.

"Just get here, Derek. Just get to the hospital. Hurry."

The roads are slick with frost, eerily empty. He remembers it's Christmas morning.

_It's our season. _

He didn't hear her wake. He didn't notice she'd gone. He didn't see anything.

_Hurry._

He's a surgeon and he is calm where others can't or won't be. His hands don't shake and his voice won't crack. Still, images flash before his eyes as if reflected in the ice-crusted windshield, in no particular order.

_Addison grinning at him, agreeing to get some coffee after lab, deep indentations around her nose from the safety goggles_

_Addison looking up at him in the bar, eyes shining with hope, then downcast once again_

_Addison standing over the incubator, pale against dark green scrubs, asking him to try_

He blinks hard against the images but she's still there, a small version of her moving before his eyes.

_Linking her arm through his in the early dawn light outside the hospital_

_Arms flailing, rain-soaked and sobbing, begging him to stay_

_Turning to the side, admiring her profile, laughing when he teases her._

_Longs legs stretched out on an adirondack chair, half asleep, eyes drifting closed._

He should feel something, but he doesn't. Not exactly. He forces his foot to ease off the gas before the car spins out. He's calm. He is calm, isn't he? Is that what he is?

The Chief is there; he meets him before he's even inside. There's a worn wreath hung on the exterior wall, a few strands of tinsel hanging limply. One more holiday ruined, another wife left behind. Richard's eyes are dark and bottomless and Derek swallows hard.

"Is she-"

"She's alive."

And for the first time, he feels something he thinks he can identify: the exquisite agony of guilt-laden relief.

The small Addison before his eyes flashes him a quick smile, tosses her long hair, and disappears.

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><p><strong><em>Reviews are warmly welcomed and always appreciated.<em>**


	2. Chapter 2

**Author's Note: **_I'm so happy to see I'm not the only one who still has a soft spot for Derek and Addison. Thanks to everyone who read and reviewed. I hope you'll let me know your thoughts on the new chapter as well. This will be a multi-chapter story, and I will update as quickly as I can (keeping in mind Isabella's well-noted comment that I need to update a certain other multi-part story too!). Thanks again for the reviews; they are greatly appreciated._

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><p><strong>The Climbing Way<br>Chapter Two**

* * *

><p>"<em>She's alive."<em>

Relief floods him, like, warmth, but his fingertips still feel icy. He stuffs his hands in his pockets.

"Is she - conscious?"

Richard's face is set. "They're trying to warm her now. It's not clear how long she was outside, but her body temperature - at least she was dressed warmly. Good boots. Gloves. Derek-"

He looks up at the hand on his shoulder.

"Do you have any idea what she was doing here? There's no record of any of her patients in distress, or anyone paging her."

Mutely he shakes his head.

He hears her voice, thick with tears.

_I want to go home. I can't be here. I'm going to go back to New York. I'm leaving tonight._

The hand on his shoulder squeezes gently. It feels like a dead weight. "You should prepare yourself."

_Prepare yourself. _It's something he's said before, but only when it's said to him - the other time, and again now - does he realize how hollow the words are. How can anyone prepare for something like this?

"She was very lucky, but there's going to be a significant recovery period. There's a hard road ahead. She sustained some cranio-facial trauma. They called in neuro- no, Derek, don't even think about it."

He swallows the comment he never got a chance to make. "Who is it?"

"Lieberman, from Mercy West."

He grunts something like approval. Two residents he doesn't recognize pass him, clucking over coffee cups. Everything irks him: the smell of the coffee. The timbre of their voices. One more high-pitch fucking Christmas carol piped in at the nurses station.

"She's going to make it, Derek."

He shakes his head. He wants facts, not comfort. "I still don't understand what happened."

"Neither do we." Richard sighs. "Some of the details will have to wait for her to wake up, I think. When they found her, she - she didn't have a wallet or identification, but the security guard recognized her."

"Some security."

"Derek." Richard places a hand on his arm. "They can't be everywhere at once."

Derek shakes him off, not ready for more platitudes.

"Did you-"

"They called me right away. And the press officer. When there's evidence of a crime on hospital property, and on Christmas Day..."

"A crime." He repeats the word, only half-believing.

"The details of the attack aren't clear, but-"

_Attack._ He can tell Richard regrets the word. He keeps talking.

"She was in the lot. Her car wasn't there, and if it was parked there the night before-"

"It was there. I think so. I'm pretty sure I saw it." He fiddles with the cuff of his jacket. He threw on the first things he could find when he left and there's a stray thread coming out of the buttonhole. Absently he thinks that Addison would be displeased.

"Then it seems likely that it was stolen."

"A carjacking."

Richard nods.

"And her - her injuries..."

"There's, uh, there's trauma to her face and head, as I said. She was probably struck with something. And her ribs."

Derek swallows hard. He can take this. It's just another patient. It's just symptoms. He stays calm. "Anything else?"

"Some trauma to the right side. It was treated in triage, but there may need to be some...other considerations down the line. Grafting. Our first concern was warming her, particularly the extremities, and-"

"What caused those injuries?"

"It's unclear."

Derek stares at him and Richard fumbles with his glasses, removing them and polishing them against the hem of his sweater. It's a maroon and green pattern. Adele probably bought it for him.

"Richard."

"Based on the pattern of the injuries, it seems she may have been dragged for a short while as the car-"

He doesn't hear the rest of it. There's a faint buzzing in his ears and his stomach turns over. Dragged. He fights nausea. _Dragged._

He didn't even notice her leave.

"Anything else?"

"A broken arm." Richard looks over Derek's left shoulder.

"Where is she?"

Richard tells him the room, then keeps talking. He looks older somehow, jowly. "She was triaged, but she'll need surgical intervention for - for some of her injuries, as we discussed. Some minor stitching to her mouth, and the facial - we got you here as soon as we could, Derek," he calls after him, but Derek is already walking away.

He strides with purpose and stops with equal purpose in front of the window, drawing sharp breath. She looks icy pale, nearly blending in with the sheets, except for the patches of bruising and the dark-red streaks of her hair - he can tell by the color it's damp. Her eyes are closed, a tube protruding from the bloodless O of her lips.

He tries, and fails, to draw a memory of the last time he saw her. She was sleeping next to him. Or was she? Maybe he fell asleep first. He was lying there, he remembers that. What was she wearing? For some reason, it seems terribly important to recall what she was wearing. In New York, she slept sometimes in his old shirts, sometimes in the silk pajamas he teased her about but secretly loved. He packed most of his things when he left New York - had he left any of those type of shirts behind? He tries to think. Or did he take those too?

Her skin is bluish white against the metallic silver of the warming suit. Jagged stripes of red and green track her progress on the monitors.

Red and green and silver. Twinkling lights.

The large clock on the wall reminds him it's still Christmas morning.

* * *

><p><strong>Four Years Earlier<strong>

* * *

><p>Silver tinsel, glittery red and green globes, and a massive tree making the whole first floor smell of pine needles, peppermint and a faint whiff of burning wire from the lights. It's the same every year.<p>

Almost the same.

He finds her on the last step of the back staircase, hands wrapped around a lumpy red and green mug. One of the grandchildren must have made it. She glances up at his footsteps and her shadowed eyes pierce right through him.

"It's still Christmas, Addie." He eases down beside her, softens his voice. "Our season."

She stares into her cup.

"Juju?"

She shrugs.

He takes the mug from her, sips the warm liquid. It's a little too sweet - Amy's batch, no doubt - and rapidly cooling. She's hardly had any, he notices, didn't eat much at dinner. It's easy to slip a still-full plate past his mother on Christmas Eve, the long table spilling over with children and grandchildren, his nieces and nephews always louder than he remembers. They're mostly calm now, the little ones asleep under a brother-in-law's semi-watchful eye, the others dressed for church and distracted by a seasonal movie in the den.

"Addie." He touches her leg.

When she speaks, it's so quiet he can hardly hear her. "It was supposed to be - this Christmas -"

"I know." He sets the mug down and wraps an arm around her, pulling her into the crook of his shoulder. She doesn't resist, but doesn't melt into him either. She has to hunch her back a bit to fit against him. He's always loved her height, the regal way she carries herself. Even in the beginning, even in a lab coat spattered with god-knows-what and a pair of smudged safety goggles, she stood like a queen. She's wearing flat shoes now, the closest she'll come to the Shepherd tradition of walking the house in bedroom slippers. His are an old pair of scuffed moccasins; he's had them since college and he loves them. She says they're vile; she's probably right, but he's not ready to let them go.

"Derek-"

"Just give us a minute." His voice is muffled by the top of Addison's head.

But Kathleen hovers. "Is she-"

"Kath, please."

Nodding, his sister departs, no doubt to the clucking henhouse of the kitchen, likely to send another sister in her place.

Addison is stiff against him, and he debates his options: taking her upstairs for some privacy, in case she's going to let go, or riding out the moment, since at least she's letting him hold her. Chances are it will be lost if they stand up. He hesitates.

The moment is lost. She pulls back, swiping a hand across her face. She hasn't shed a tear. "I'm okay."

He kisses her forehead. "I know."

"He was supposed to be here, Derek."

There are no words. "Addie-"

"You guys ready?"

"Damn it, Kath-" He jerks his chin toward the interruption, but it's Amy this time, blue eyes wide.

"Mom said to tell you we're leaving in ten minutes for church."

"Thank you, Amy," he says tiredly.

He waits until she's gone to address Addison. "We don't have to go."

"I want to." Her voice is slightly muffled in her own hand; she's cupping her chin, elbow propped on her knee. His hands hover near her, but he knows better than to argue. She unfolds slowly from the stair.

"I'll go get ready."

"Addison." But his entreaty bounces off her retreating back as she climbs the stairs.

"I'll be down in ten minutes."

They assemble by the foot of the stairs like they have every year for as long as he can remember. When he said _we don't have to go to my family this year,_ Addison had looked horrified. Sometimes he thinks she treasures these Shepherd traditions more than he does.

Yes, she wanted to come, she said. Yes, she was fine, she said to the gaggle of concerned sisters-in-law. She cradled one baby nephew after another, let her little nieces braid her long hair and raid her carefully packed suitcase for presents. No, she didn't want seconds. Yes, she was feeling all right. She lay beside him in his childhood bed, two pairs of long legs stretching to the end, the same plaid coverlet he'd slept under for years. He rested a tentative hand on her thigh; she pretended to be asleep. No, she didn't want breakfast. Yes, she was happy to help the children string popcorn. Draw Christmas pictures. Hang the low-strung ornaments. Decorate Christmas cookies.

_Keeping busy._ That's what his mother used to call it. Addison doesn't use those words, but -

"Derek?"

"Yeah."

His mother looks up at him, patting his arm, her warm dark eyes crinkling at the corners.

"You two don't have to go, you know," she whispers.

"I know." He rubs a weary hand through his hair. "She wants to."

_Keeping busy._

"Derek, if there anything we can do for her..."

"You're doing it. It's fine." It's anything but, of course. "I think she just wants things to be normal," he says carefully. Never mind that they won't be ever again.

"Ready to go!" The cheerful voice is, inexplicably, Addison's, and she's poised on the middle of the staircase with one hand resting delicately against the banister like she's posting for a portrait.

She's washed her face and fixed her hair and she's radiant in a dark green dress. The color makes her skin look purer, her eyes bluer, her hair glossier. She smiles brilliantly at the assembled Shepherds.

He sees his mother draw back slightly, exchange glances with Kathleen.

It's the kind of thing that makes him wince for his wife, knowing how much she loves his family and how, despite his sisters' attachment to her and despite Addison's intense desire to please his mother, she can never quite fit in with them as well as she should. He knows his mother would prefer to see her tears, even to hear her refuse to take part in any of the seemingly endless family holiday traditions. And he knows Addison wouldn't do that, would prefer to cover her flushed cheeks with makeup and her pain with a carefully composed smile. The facade is her way of sparing all of them. He knows this; he's spent enough time alone with her, coaxing her to let it go, to be certain that he is right.

"You look beautiful, dear." His mother bestows a benevolent smile on her, but he sees behind it:

_She's sweet, but just - she's just a little bit cold, isn't she_?

_Everyone handles things in their own way, Mom._

Addison's eyes meet his, anxious for approval, and he nods.

_You know my mother loves you, Addie._

And she does, in her way, it's just - it's not enough. Sometimes, with Addison, it feels like nothing will ever be enough. No amount of reassurance, no amount of love.

She's still looking at him and there's something in her eyes - a naked sort of need that makes him feel slippery with sadness, but before he can say anything one of Sharon's twins - he can never tell them apart unless he looks closely - slips her small hand into Addison's. "Can I ride with you, Addie?"

"Sure, Katie. Of course."

"Addison," he calls after her but she's already out the door, silver-white Christmas lights illuminating her hair.

* * *

><p>"Derek?"<p>

"Yeah." He rests his hand against the glass for just a moment. She looks so still. So white and still. "Can I-"

"Of course. Just put on a sterile robe."

_I'm ready to go!_

Draped cleanly and anything but ready, he walks slowly through the door.

"Addison?"

She doesn't respond. _Of course not, Shepherd._ He shakes his head at his own stupidity. There's no evidence she can hear him. He reaches for the chart at the foot of her bed, wanting the security of medical jargon and needing to train his eyes away from her slack face.

Up close her injuries look worse than they did from behind the window. She's covered up to her neck and he can't see her arm or the damage Richard hesitated to describe.

_Dragged._

From a foot away her face is a mottled rainbow. There's blood at her hairline, dark red swelling around one eye and blue bruising at the base of her neck.

He's a surgeon. A doctor. A husband. A completely fucking useless addition to this room, because all he can do is stare. He should move closer, he should whisper reassurances, he should tell her that he loves her.

He should do a lot of things.

He's paralyzed a foot away, a lump of a man, watching the mechanical rise and fall of her silver-covered chest. His lips part almost of their own accord, the words forced between them not what he expected:

"_I'm sorry_."

Her eyes flutter.

"Addison?" His feet suddenly remember how to move and he strides closer, leaning over and cupping her face as carefully as he can, mindful of the swelling bruises.

Her mouth moves slightly, straining around the tubes.

"Don't try to talk." His thumbs etch parallel lines at her temples, trying to calm her in advance of what he knows to be the horror of waking up intubated.

She blinks confusion at him, eyes wide, her gaze darting around the room.

"You're okay." He leans closer. "Addison. Look at me. You're in the hospital. You're going to be fine. You've been intubated. Don't try to talk." He turns to call Richard but the room is already filling up. Multiple figures in scrubs surround them.

He's not sure how aware she is of her surroundings, but she comes alive as they pull the tubes from her throat, arcing from the bed, coughing and sputtering. He loses his grip; two nurses push past him to hold her down. She thrashes, swinging her head back and forth until someone immobilizes that too.

He stands aside, hating his own impotence and the terror in her eyes equally.

The nurse hands him a bowl of ice chips "for her throat." He glares at her in spite of the fact that he hadn't thought to do it himself. It's the nurse soothing her, brushing back her hair, explaining where she is.

"Addison." He moves closer, drags the lone plastic chair in the corner up to her side. "Addie, can you hear me?"

She's trying to mouth something but her voice is a cracked and hoarse whisper, louder than silence but less communicative. He looks at her, at the temporary wrap on her arm, the swelling at her throat and the bruising around her face. His professional side tries to catch her eyes, track her pupils. She looks uncharacteristically small under the heated blanket.

She coughs, and he can tell from her expression - even under the bruises, even under the stoicism - that it hurts. He remembers Richard mentioning something about stitches in her mouth.

"Here." He fishes an ice chip from the bowl, slips it carefully between her lips. The first one falls and he brushes it away; the second one makes it into her mouth. She sucks slowly, raspily. Tentatively he reaches toward where her hand would be under the warming blanket, then realizes he never asked which arm was broken.

Her breaths are scratchy and shallow; he doesn't like the sound of them. "Take it slow." He brushes his fingers against her temple again, one of the least bruised portions of her face. "Nice slow breaths, Addie."

Her eyes find his and he has that feeling he's had so many times, that she is desperately seeking something he can't or won't give her. This time he thinks he'd like to but he fears it's too late.

"Addison-"

The team comes back in then, Richard patting his arm, encouraging him to his feet.

"Derek, let them work - no, you can wait outside, let them finish the assessment."

"Can I just-"

"Give them some room, Derek. This is step one, okay? Let's talk outside."

He looks at Addison. She still hasn't said anything, but her eyes are darting around the room again.

He stands over her, resting a hand at the top of the bed, near her head. There's blood crusted in her hair. "I'll be back in a few minutes." His voice sounds hollow to his own ears.

She reaches out then, clutching weakly at him with what must be her good hand, cracked lips struggling to form a word.

"Hey, it's all right, Addie. They need to check you out and then I'm coming back in. You're going to be fine."

She doesn't let go, still trying to speak. He leans closer to try to make out the sounds.

"Rowan," she breathes. Her voice is so faint he can hardly hear it, cracking on the last syllable. "Is he - is he okay?

He closes his eyes, welcoming this pain like an old friend. The room is dead quiet, the air too thick to breathe. "Yeah," he murmurs. He opens his eyes again to see his lie reflected in impossibly blue irises. A tear falls. "He's okay."

* * *

><p><strong><em>Reviews are warmly welcomed and greatly appreciated.<em>**


	3. Chapter 3

**Author's Note**: _Thank you so much for the reviews - this story is flowing very quickly so far, and I really appreciate all the support and comments. I hope you'll keep letting me know your thoughts as you read the coming chapters. I'm really enjoying the chance to try something different, and I'm thrilled that it's working for others as well. As many of you have noted in the comments, there are open questions from the first two chapters. Everything will be illuminated eventually as the story progresses - either in flashback, in the present day narrative, or both. I'll try to continue to update quickly._

* * *

><p><strong>The Climbing Way<br>****Chapter Three**

* * *

><p>Richard follows him out the door, closing it behind them with a decisive click. He clears his throat, steepling his fingers. "Derek, there are two detectives waiting in my office. They want to talk to you."<p>

"Right now?" He glances through the half-drawn shades; he can't make her out in the tight semi-circle of scrub-clad figures. "What about-"

"She'll be in with the team for a while. They'll take care of her."

"Can't it wait?"

"They're anxious to speak with you right away."

"Okay." He nods. "They're investigating the, uh-" he breaks off, not sure how to finish.

"Right." Richard gestures for him to follow. "They're investigating."

There are two of them, in plainclothes, both larger than he is. The suits make no secret of their size and he can see their holsters underneath the flaps of their jackets. The smaller of the two is holding a legal pad and pen; the larger, who has a ruddy complexion and sharp eyes, looks him up and down before holding out a hand.

"Mark Bromley, and this is my partner Dennis Callaghan. We've been assigned to investigate the incident discovered on hospital property this morning."

The language is so passive and general. _The incident. Hospital property. _He knows how to do this; it's part of his job, too. Dissociate. Distance. _The patient. The procedure. _

"Derek Shepherd," he says, though he knows it's unnecessary.

"I'll leave you alone," Richard says. "Derek?"

He looks up.

"Just call if you need anything."

He nods and turns back to the two detectives, who gesture for him to sit. He does, on the stiff couch along the wall. They remain standing.

"How is she doing?" the shorter one - Callaghan; he's always been good with names - asks abruptly.

"She's, uh, she was in critical condition, but they've stabilized-" he breaks off, condenses the jargon. "She's being evaluated," he says. "She has some significant injuries, and the team is looking at her now."

They watch him, not speaking, not making any notes. He finds himself shifting slightly, his fingers twitching, feeling like a slide under a microscope. For just a minute he's curious, then the pieces fall into place. The tone, the silence, the necessity of speaking to him right now.

_They think I_ - but he can't even finish the thought. He closes his eyes briefly.

"Dr. Shepherd, Derek - can I call you Derek?"

"Yes." He figures it's one less point on the god-complex surgeon profile they've probably already painted for him.

"Derek, are you prepared to speak to us without a lawyer present?"

"Do I need one?"

"That's not really my call." Detective Bromley makes short work of his rights, ticking them off on thick fingers. Derek notices the broad gold band on the fourth finger of his left hand. "You understand?"

"Yes."

"You want to talk to us?"

"I want to help you catch whoever did this."

"Then we want the same thing."

"But I need to - I should be down there. With her." The words tumble out before he can self-censor. "I should..." he trails off.

"This won't take long." They both smile at him, predatory smiles, and his stomach makes a kind of empty lurch. He nods, as ready as he can be.

"So, Derek, you want to tell me where you were last night?"

He takes a deep breath. He answers.

They ask him again.

He answers again.

The back of his neck starts to sweat. They pace. He checks his watch. They said they would find him before they started the next step. He glances around the room. There's a picture on Richard's desk of him with Adele, at least ten years ago. Maybe fifteen. They look younger, smoother. More like he remembers Richard from New York.

They offer him water before he realizes he's parched; he draws a grateful sip.

"So someone else can account for your whereabouts between eleven and four?"

"No." He grits his teeth. "As I've said a few - like I said, we went to bed at around one. Together. The hospital called at around five and woke me up."

"And she was gone."

"Right."

"And you didn't hear her get up."

"No."

"Or leave."

"No."

"You got a big place? Soundproof walls?"

He props his head in his fist. The conversation already feels endless. "No, not really."

The detective waits.

"It's a trailer."

"Two doctors in a trailer?"

"I own the land." Why is he telling him this?

"So your wife gets up and leaves your..._trailer..._and you don't hear anything."

"Right."

"Must've been tired."

He doesn't answer.

"Why don't you walk me through the previous night."

For the fourth time

"We met at the bar across the street." He indicates the general direction of Joe's with his chin. "We had a few drinks, and we left at around midnight. I'm not exactly sure of the time."

"Who else was with you at the bar?"

"No one. There were other people there," he amends. "But we were sitting alone."

"Why?"

He doesn't know how to answer that.

"So she's drinking, you're fighting."

"I never said we were fighting!"

"Whoa." He holds up a large hand. "Let's not get excited. You've got a real temper, hm? How does your wife feel about that?"

_Once she said at least she knew it meant I cared._

He starts slightly at the memory.

"You get along well, do you, you and your wife? Very close?"

"We get along fine."

"So if I asked your colleagues, they'd say you two get along great? Best of friends? She's the love of your life, right?"

"Where is this going?" He curses his sharp tone when he sees the smaller of the two men scribbling something in a pad.

"Someone beat the hell out of your wife on Christmas Eve. Dumped her in the parking lot where you both work. That sound like something a stranger would do?"

"How the hell should I know what kind of person would do something like this?"

They're silent, looking at him. "I guess that's the question, isn't it, Derek."

He takes a deep, steadying breath. "Can we please wrap this up? I'd really like to be there when they finish evaluating her."

"You ever hit your wife?"

"Of course not."

"You sound pretty sure."

He shakes his head, exhaling hard. He's quickly learned there are no right answers, so he keeps his mouth closed.

"Never got physical? Not even once?"

_Derek? What are you doing? No! Addison's panicky voice, crouching low on the staircase, clenching the spokes of the banister. Holding on so tight. Peeling her fingers loose was the hardest part; she went limp and stopped fighting him before they reached the door. It was as simple as gripping her wrists in one of his hands, flinging the door open with the other, pushing her over the threshold. Slamming the door in her face as she sobbed. _

"Never."

"Christmas is a stressful time. You see a lot of patients around Christmas? A lot of traumas?"

He nods mutely.

"Lots of injuries from fights?"

He nods again.

"Gonna need you to say 'yes' or 'no' for our boy taking notes over here."

"Okay. Yes."

"You see lots of injuries from fights around Christmas?"

"Yes. I do."

"Why is that?"

_How the hell should I know? _he wants to hiss. "Holidays are stressful for some people."

"For you too?"

"I like Christmas."

_At least we used to._

* * *

><p><strong>Five Years Earlier<strong>

* * *

><p>"Merry Christmas!" Addison lifts her glass in the fourth toast of the evening, the flickering firelight catching all the colors in her hair.<p>

"Merry Christmas," he echoes, clinking his flute lightly against hers and kissing her cheek.

"'S not Christmas." Mark slurs a bit; as usual, he'd started the party before he arrived.

"You know what I mean." Addison laughs and tosses a candy cane in his direction. "It's the Christmas season. It's _pre-_Christmas. If I had my way Christmas would last the whole month, anyway."

"If she had her way, other things would last a lot longer too, right, Derek?"

"Mark!" She throws a pillow at his smirking face; he catches it and throws it back; Derek deflects it before it can hit Addison.

"Cut it out, Mark."

"Can't a fellow have fun on Christmas?"

"Not when there's a very breakable vase a few feet away."

"She threw it first."

"She has better aim." He shakes his head at his old friend. "Behave."

"Would you look at all the rules at Grandma's house." But Mark's tone is good natured as he props his feet on the coffee table.

Derek ignores him, leans back against the soft cushions of the couch. He's warm with scotch and red wine, firelight and food and company. Addison snuggles close to him, brushing her face against his chest, and he rubs the sleeve of her white sweater.

It's old fashioned, maybe, but he can't repress a certain king-of-the-castle satisfaction to be cuddling with his beautiful wife in their tastefully appointed home, a fresh log on the fireplace and an artfully decorated Christmas tree casting flattering reddish-white light on their faces. They need only one thing to complete the picture, but there will be time for that.

This is their holiday, in their home. They'll go to his mother's house for Christmas, of course - as they do every year - but it's their own tradition to start the season early. They savor the decoration of the tree, the careful selection of gifts. Tonight it's pre-Christmas at the their brownstone, Mark and -

"Hey Mark, weren't you supposed to bring that girl...what was her name?"

"Courtney? He shrugs. "She wasn't the one."

"The one?" he asks as Addison squeaks "the one you'll _marry_?" She pronounces the last word with exaggerated horror.

"Hardly." Mark snorts. "More like _the_ _one_ to share a lovely homemade pre-Christmas with my very dearest friends."

"Homemade?" Addison sits up, Derek's hand trailing down her back as she rises.

"What, you didn't cook all this?" Mark gestures at the generous Citarella spread with mock surprise. "Derek, did you know your wife didn't cook all this?"

Derek rolls his eyes.

"I suppose you think you're too pretty to cook." Mark waggles a friendly eyebrow.

"Fine. I'll cook next time. You can enjoy my specialty: Cheerios and - " she turns to Derek. "Honey, do we have bananas?"

He plays along. "I doubt it."

"Cheerios and milk, then."

"Sounds great." Mark grins at both of them. "As long as this melon-proscuitto thing is there too." He tilts his chin toward one of the serving platters. "Delicious."

"Did I try those?" Derek edges into the conversation.

"Here." Addison spears one with a dainty cocktail fork and feeds it to him, laughing as he pretends to nibble her hand. "Derek!"

She's still laughing as they close the door behind Mark, a gust of cold air whooshing in as he departs with a wave and a grin. He's promised to come bright and early in the morning, with coffee, for the drive to Derek's mother's house. Mark will be late, of course, and he'll forget the coffee, but they'll cover all the old roads and Addison will make them sing along with Frank Sinatra's Christmas album and they'll pretend they hate it. Just like every year.

And just like every year, they keep up their own tradition of exchanging gifts privately, the night before the drive. Tonight, it's the night before Christmas Eve. Christmas Eve _Eve, _Addison jokes.

With the empty boxes scattered - well, neatly scattered, as Addison is wont to do, and the well-received necklace draped over the elegant column of her throat, they stand in front of the large front window with the lamps in the living room dimmed, looking out at the snow-dusted street. Everything comes together on nights like these, as if the city itself is cooperating with their desire for a storybook holiday. They're close enough to the park to have heard the fairytale clip-clop of horses when they opened the door for Mark and waved him into a quickly hailed taxi. And everything smells better, too: like sugar cookies, even though they don't bake. Like the crisp pine of the tree and the sweet tang of champagne.

Addison twines her arms around his neck, kisses him lightly. "Merry Christmas."

"Merry Christmas, Addie."

"Honey." She leans back, her eyes bright. "I have one more thing for you."

"Addie, you've already given me enough." The new rod and reel (and a promise not to complain when he shows her his catches at the lake house), the complicated-looking tangle of black-and-silver wires that will enable him to talk on his mobile phone in the car (but only if he's careful); the impossibly butter-soft jacket ("Already broken in! So you can finally let Goodwill have the old one").

"No, this is...different."

Her hesitant stammer is cute; he smiles at her. "Go on."

"It's, uh, it's not a thing, exactly. It's something I want to tell you. Okay." She draws a deep breath. "Here goes. I- I'm ready."

He widens his eyes, almost afraid to believe he's heard her correctly. "You - are you sure?'

"I'm sure. I'm positive. I'm ready, Derek."

A grin spreads across his face. He kisses her deeply, tasting champagne and gingerbread, wraps her in his arms. Her hair tickles his nose, smelling delicious. Gripping her shoulders, he holds her away for a moment. There are tears in her eyes, and maybe in his too.

"That's the best Christmas present I've ever gotten," he whispers, and pulls her close again.

* * *

><p>"You got kids, Derek?"<p>

He pauses. The fluorescent lighting overhead buzzes faintly. He's not sure he's noticed that before. He's silent, listening to the sound.

"Not such a complicated question, is it?"

_Maybe for some people._

"Let me guess. You got a couple of 'em she doesn't know about? Maybe one of those pretty nurses would know?"

Derek grits his teeth. It's nothing personal, they have to try to rile him up - he knows this, he reminds himself of this - but he still feels his heart pounding.

"No," he says evenly, forcing his voice to remain low. "We don't have any children."

The door swings open. "Sorry to interrupt." He welcomes Richard's familiar voice. "Derek, they're going to start stitching her up now, if you want to be there."

"I do." He stands. "If we can continue this, Detective-"

"-Bromley. And yes, we can and will continue this. We're not going anywhere."

Derek forces a polite nod as he leaves.

"Richard." He draws a shaking breath as they descend the stairs. "They think I - they're acting like I had something to do with this."

Richard frowns. "I'm sure it's just how they ask their questions."

"No, it's more than that, I-" But they're at Addison's door now, and Richard pulls back, patting his arm briefly.

"Tell her we're all pulling for her, okay?"

He should be able to do this on her own. He's her husband. But a part of him wishes Richard had crossed the threshold with him. The room feels somehow stark and overcrowded all at once, both hot and cold. He approaches her slowly.

"Hey, Addie. How are you feeling?"

It's a stupid question, unfathomably so. He's embarrassed, and she doesn't answer. But she seems more alert, straining to see him. Half her face is bandaged now; he can't decide if this makes her look better or worse. The swelling around her eye affects him most of all, hurts in a funny way he can't quite identify. He's seen enough of these injuries: the thought of someone hitting her, of how she must have closed her eyes, turned her head - he swallows hard.

"Derek." She pronounces his name carefully, hoarsely, reaching for him with her good hand. He laces his fingers through hers.

"I'm here. Lie back, Addison, try to relax."

She's straining to talk to him again. He leans over her.

"I - car - "

"It's okay." He runs a finger lightly over her forehead, avoiding the bandages. "Don't worry about the car." He wonders how much she remembers.

"We need to stitch up her mouth now." It's a doctor he doesn't recognize - Logan, he reads it off her lab coat. She turns to Addison and repeats herself clearly. He's not sure she understands, but when Dr. Logan and the brunette nurse touch her jaw, she pulls back.

"Do you want to-" Dr. Logan gestures at him.

He moves in closer. Addison grips his hand anxiously and he squeezes back.

"Addison. Addie, look at me." She meets his eyes with her good eye. It's open wide and not quite focused. "You need stitches in your mouth, Addie. You need to try to keep your head still."

She twists away.

"Can you hold her?"

But he can't. He can't bring himself to restrain her and so he takes the coward's way out, stepping back, letting two nurses pinion her head while they numb the area, and when she still pulls at their hands, they inject something else into her IV and her head goes slack again.

_Addison, I'm sorry._

And he learns that "taking it in steps," as Richard told him, means each new procedure comes just when they've finished the last. That it's going to be a while. That the painstaking stitches - she barely moves, and there's no sign she feels it - are just the beginning.

He hasn't even seen the other damage yet.

Numbly, he watches them work. In and out, over and through.

"All done. Great work."

He approaches her slowly, shamefully.

"Where - where are we?" she whispers, blinking back into that half-alert state. Her voice is thick around the stitches in her mouth.

"In the hospital." He leans over her. "You're in the hospital, and you're safe."

Confusion is evident in what he can see of her face. "No, but -" She breaks off, struggles to form a word. "What..." she trails off.

"What do you remember?"

"I - I'm not sure." Her mouth twitches. Her lower lip is swelling where they stitched it.

"That's okay." He pats her hand. "It will come back. Just-"

"Where are we?"

"In the hospital, Addison." Carefully, he strokes the unbloodied portion of her hair. "We're in the hospital. You had a - you had an accident, but you're going to be fine."

"What happened?"

"Addison." He cups her hand between both of his. "I want you to try to rest. Just try to rest."

"Where-'" but when she turns to the side pain flashes across the uncovered parts of her face and he hastens to move her back to her original position.

"Try to lie still, Addie." He keeps one hand on her good arm, applying the lightest pressure he can. She's silent, but her gaze doesn't leave his until her eyes flutter shut once more.

He brushes off Dr. Logan's reassurances that her confusion is normal after sedation. He needs air, needs to be out of the room. She's asleep. She won't know.

Closing the door behind him, he pulls his blackberry from his hip, scrolls absently through emails. He wouldn't mind some distraction, but no one is asking for his help; Richard must have warned the hospital he'd be off his service. He paces: three steps here, four steps there. On his second lap past her room, he turns a corner and his eyes fall on a familiar set of narrow, sloped shoulders. She looks up; they see each other at the same time.

"Hey." She sounds surprised to see him.

"What are you doing here?" he asks.

"I work here."

"It's Christmas."

"Right. Christmas," she says huskily. "We already did it. We did the...roommates thing, the Christmas thing, but...well...holidays. You know."

"I do know."

She looks at him and he sees her taking in his rumpled appearance. "What are _you_ doing here? Shouldn't you be with your-" she breaks off at his expression.

"Meredith-"

"Something happened," she says slowly. "Something bad."

"Meredith."

"There were police here. Lots of police. And..."

He looks at the ground.

"Oh my god. Derek."

When he looks up there's pity in her eyes, pity and knowledge and he doesn't think he can bear it.

"I'm so sorry."

He looks past her. "So am I."

She takes a step closer. It's achingly familiar, down to the wisps of hair escaping from her messy ponytail, the sharp angles of her elbows and the hesitant, yet somehow bold, stance. He doesn't move.

"Derek," she begins but she's interrupted by the approach of another resident, a stocky figure in pale blue scrubs. He recognizes him from Addison's room.

"Dr. Shepherd, we-"

"Is everything all right?" he interrupts.

"Yes. I mean, there's no change. I just wanted to - we wanted to give you these."

He lifts an eyebrow, waiting for an explanation. Out of the corner of his eye he sees Meredith shift her weight, but she makes no motion to leave.

"I'm sorry," the resident says cautiously, extending a closed fist. "Her fingers were swollen, when they- we had to cut these off." And he drops a cascade of metals into Derek's open hand.

His head buzzes; the hallway seems to shift.

He would know them anywhere. Two rings: _Will you? _and _I do._ The question and the answer.

But he's never seen them like this: four jagged half-circles of gold. One sparkling solitaire.

He closes his fingers over the broken pieces of the rings he first placed on Addison's finger. The ones she slides off before every surgery and back on afterwards.

_Slid._

_No. _He cautions himself. _Slides. _She'll operate again. If he's sure of anything, that's it.

But the sharp edges of the broken jewelry cut into his palm, and as the pain makes its way jaggedly through him he's forced to admit it: he's actually not sure of anything right now. Anything at all.

There's little time for thinking, though. Out of the corner of his eye he sees Richard walking toward them, flanked by the far smaller figure of Miranda Bailey. Their faces are set and grim and, like a patient, he finds himself waiting there, helpless, for whatever news they're bringing.

* * *

><p><strong><em>Reviews are warmly welcomed and greatly appreciated. <em>**


	4. Chapter 4

**Author's Note: **_The site was down earlier tonight - I think it was trying to prevent me from posting this chapter! Let's hope it works this time. All you reviewers are awesome - please keep it up, I love hearing what you think. And I especially love knowing how many people still want to read about Addison and Derek. _

* * *

><p><strong>The Climbing Way<br>Chapter Four **

* * *

><p>He's rooted to the spot as the two figures approach.<p>

Then Richard calls his name and he forces his feet to move, catching up to them. "How is she?"

"She's hanging in there. They need to get a scan before the surgical treatment plan is determined. But before they can do that, they need to clean the injury site." He pauses, clearing his throat. "It's a - difficult process."

_A difficult process. _

"They'll need your help," Bailey interjects.

"Of course," he says shortly. He looks at her for the first time. "Dr. Bailey, you're on today?"

"That I am."

"It's Christmas," he says dumbly, before he can stop himself. "Don't you need to - be somewhere?"

Bailey just presses her lips together. "I'm right where I need to be."

Derek swallows hard, grateful for the distraction of Richard's voice as they walk.

"She was actually very lucky," he says again and Derek fists a hand in his palm to keep from responding.

_"You're very lucky, actually." Another chief, another hospital. "If she hadn't already been here when it happened, you might not have gotten her here in time. You could have lost her." Lucky. He was lucky. But then when he saw her white panicked face in the hospital bed - "Derek, you have to make them do it - please, Derek, you have to try" - he realized that the chief was wrong. They weren't lucky at all. He was going to lose her anyway. _

"She was dragged a very short distance, and the injuries are comparably far less severe than I've seen. The traumatic response team said the same thing."

That word again. _Dragged._ He doesn't like it. It threatens to pull him out of the safely sterile surgical mindset.

"It could have been much worse."

_It has been worse, _he thinks. Out loud he just says: "I understand."

He follows Richard and Bailey - he can't think of her as Miranda - toward the discrete ICU room, isolated from the rest of the unit but accessible to the same personnel. There are two unfamiliar people outside the door - not doctors.

The woman holds out her hand in introduction; the younger man at her side, loaded with bags of what he recognizes as evidence materials, nods at him.

"I'm Brooke Lovello, with the police department's forensic collection unit. This is my partner. We work mainly on sexual assault cases."

"She-"

"There's no indication she was sexually assaulted," the investigator continues smoothly. "We also work on other assault cases where evidence might be contained on a victim's person."

"She's in critical condition." He angles his head toward the door. "Does this need to be done now? Maintaining sterility..." Richard puts a hand on his arm and he brushes it off.

"We're well trained in moving quickly and efficiently and we certainly don't want to aggravate any injuries or compromise her recovery. But we have a limited time in which to try to collect evidence, Dr. Shepherd. This window is crucial to trying to locate your wife's attacker or attackers."

"Derek." Richard's voice is close to her ear. "This won't take long, and then we'll begin the cleaning process we discussed."

What else can he say? He follows them inside. They circle Addison like prey, the male investigator starting to remove and assemble bags and kits. He's reminded, unpleasantly, of their first-year cadaver, and wills Addison to open her eyes.

She doesn't.

So he focuses on the evidence collection materials. "Is there any chance you'll find something..."

"We're going to do everything we can. I understand she was wearing gloves during the attack, which means we won't find any matter under her fingernails. We'll still look, of course."

Addison is still heavily sedated, half-asleep, barely stirring, the prongs of tubing in her nose delivering extra oxygen. He monitors her breathing on the screens above her bed. She hardly moves as they scan her hair and skin with ultraviolet light, comb for fibers. He's seen it before. She makes a soft noise when they tug a few red strands from their roots, but then her face slackens again.

He winces slightly when the investigator clips her fingernails and her assistant carefully bags the evidence. Addison's always maintained scrupulously perfect nails - he used to tease her about them. The short, blunt nails left behind look all wrong on her hands.

"We've kept her clothes as evidence - they're going over them now back at the lab."

"What was she wearing?" he blurts before he can stop himself. Color rises in his cheeks at his own inanity.

The investigator just looks at him as if it's a perfectly normal question. "A black wool winter coat, full length. Fur lined boots. Insulated leather gloves. Jeans. A thermal shirt. A sweater. The layers were good protection for the cold, and we believe actually helped mitigate some of the trauma she sustained."

_The trauma. _He's grateful she doesn't say "dragged."

But his mind is stuck on _thermal shirt._ He doesn't have to see it to recognize it. It will be olive green. It will have a small hole in one of the cuffs. It will be his.

"Some jewelry," she continues, "which I understand was returned to you already."

He'd stuffed them into his pocket, can feel the warmth of the metal through his jeans. _With this ring, I thee wed. _

"Her clothes were cut off by the triage team when they brought her in," she continues calmly - almost conversationally - as she works. "We'll go over them for hair and fibers, maybe even a partial print if we're lucky. It's happened. Of course we keep samples from the emergency response team on file for control purposes." She looks at Derek. "We'll want to collect some samples for you as well, just to rule anything out."

He tips his head back slightly, trying to increase the air flow in the tight quarters of the room. It's chilly in here, but feels overly warm anyway. "Of course."

She smiles at him as she carefully lifts the swollen fingers of Addison's broken arm. "It's just procedure. You know."

"Yeah, I know."

Something occurs to him. "They took her bag, her hospital ID - what if they-" but he can't bring himself to finish.

"There's an officer posted outside her room. Someone will be there around the clock."

He watches the investigators work with extra care around the heavily bandaged side of her body. He still hasn't seen what's underneath.

"With injuries like your wife's, the typical scenario is that the victim doesn't relinquish whatever the perpetrators are attempting to take - her bag, maybe, or the car itself, in this case."

"No." He shakes his head. "We're - she's from New York. She worked in a tough - she wouldn't have fought for her bag. Or the car."

The investigator just nods. "We'll try to get a statement from her, see if she remembers anything - but your chief has asked us to wait until her injuries are scanned."

"There's a surgical team in place," he begins. "They may want to operate quickly after the scans."

Her response is smooth but insistent: "It's better if we speak with her before surgery."

He doesn't have to ask why. He's been in the ER when crime victims were brought in. Had a detective run down the hall with the gurney, desperately barking questions at a badly beaten woman as they wheeled her in for emergency surgery. So that if she died in surgery, they might have something to go on to catch her attacker.

_If she died._

They work efficiently, though it feels longer to him: the murmuring of the investigators to each other, the pull and tick of the wall clock, the hum of the machines. He silently swabs his own mouth, submits to having several hairs plucked from his head. He thanks them when they're finished, relieved when they leave. Anything for more air in the closeness of the room.

Bailey, who had been standing near Addison's head for the duration of the collection, one hand lightly touching her hair, turns to Derek.

"Is there...anyone else you want us to call?" she asks. "Her parents?"

They're the last people who should be called. He shakes his head. There is one call he needs to make himself, one more Christmas that needs to be ruined, but he's not ready for that yet. "I'll take care of it. Later."

"Dr. Shepherd."

He looks up at Bailey's voice.

"This next part - this can be tough."

"I've been in the room before, with burn victims. When I was an intern." He trains his eyes away from the bandages.

"This isn't some faceless burn victim, and you're not an intern. This is harder."

"It's fine."

The team comes in then. Bailey gestures to him and, after trying for a moment to decipher what she wants, he moves closer to the bed, standing by Addison's head.

"They're going to wake her up now, so they can test the nerve response. Are you ready?"

He nods, his throat dry.

The doctors - Vincent, the burn specialist; Polonik, infection diseases, both glance at him. Vincent nods at him, one hand on the temporary bandage. "Shepherd. They talked to you about-"

"Yes." He doesn't want to hear more.

"We need you to try to keep her calm."

He fights the urge to scream. To grab the doctor, shake him, tell him that it's his fault they're in this position and he's the last person who would be able to keep her calm. That the last time they spoke, he made her cry.

Twice.

She's more alert already, looking up at him now, but he can't tell anymore. He can't tell what she knows or what she remembers. Her eyes are mirrors; he sees only his own pain reflected back and nothing at all of her.

"Addison." He leans toward her. Bailey nods encouragingly. "It's okay," he says lamely. Her chin lifts, confusion setting into her eyes.

"Get in there, Shepherd."

He moves closer. "Addison, they need to look at the ... your injuries. Just try to relax, and-"

He knows without looking the first time they touch her from the sound she makes. They're holding her mostly immobile but her head jerks, choked gasps escaping her throat. He freezes. She strains with her good arm, cries out.

"Get in her face - talk to her!" Vincent says sharply.

"Addison. Addie, you need to try to lie still. Breathe, Addison."

Her face is white under the bruising, her breath coming in short spurts. He sees their hands move, and she cries out. His own stomach cramps at the sound.

"Addison, it's okay. Try to lie still-" but her good hand grasps at air, her face contorting.

He raises his voice. "Can't you give her something more for the pain?"

"We can't increase the morphine; we need her to stay conscious so we can test the nerve response."

He knows this. But it's different when he's standing right in front of her and her wide, panicked eyes are locked on his.

"Addie, hey. You're doing fine." Beads of sweat roll between his shoulder blades. She moans, her voice catching at the end, and he clutches the plastic bed rail for strength. "Just breathe. You can breathe through it."

Vincent mutters something to the resident at his side, who makes a note. His fingers poise over her skin again and Derek leans closer. Sweat is breaking on her brow as she pants. "It's okay, Addie, it's almost over. Breathe. It's almost over." It's a lie and it sounds like a lie.

A high-pitched sound escapes her and her shoulders arc off the bed for just a second before the resident pins them again.

"You need to try to keep her calm."

"I'm trying!"

But this is his problem; this is always his problem, isn't it? He thinks he's trying. Maybe he even wants to try. But her eyes, bruised and blue and shimmering with tears, say otherwise. He swallows the sour taste of betrayal, listens to her jagged breaths and knows he can't help her.

_Please, Derek. Please, they have to try. If you tell them, they'll listen. Please! _

He steps back, doesn't hear them calling for him to get in there, to talk to her. The only voice he hears is hers, the hoarse cry of someone without the strength to scream. Her shoulders rise from the bed again as she cries out.

"Hold her down!"

His vision tunnels.

Then something pushes past him.

"Addison, look at me. You can do this. I know. I know it hurts. But you can do this. You're strong, and you can do this. Just look at me. We're gonna do this together. There you go." The voice is firm, commanding, and compassionate. He doesn't have to look at Addison to see if she's responding. The thrashing slows, the beeping on the monitors starting to settle.

He looks.

Bailey's got a surgical towel in one hand, holding Addison's face steady. Her other hand is clamped through hers, her face very close to his wife's.

"Good girl. You can do this. Hold on. Hold onto my hand."

He leans back against the wall, feeling two feet high, watching a resident who's known his wife for less than three months do what he couldn't do.

_Derek, please don't let them do this. Don't let them take him. Derek!_

He's failed her all over again.

When they finish, she's pale but conscious. Bailey wipes the moisture from her face with a damp cloth. "You did great. You're a warrior."

To Derek she says: "They'll take her upstairs for a CT now."

They're looking at him and he realizes they're waiting for him to do something. He moves closer to her bed. She looks exhausted, her undamaged eye drooping closed, her good arm limp at her side. "Addison, I-"

All eyes are on him. His collar feels too tight suddenly, his throat smaller than it used to be.

"I'll see you in a little while," he whispers finally.

She never opens her eyes.

He walks out of the room, face hot with shame, right into Meredith's path.

"Derek."

He just looks at her, unable to speak.

"I should say something. I want to ask if you're okay, but - I don't think - that's the right question." She pauses. "Can I do anything? For you?"

He shakes his head.

"Do you, uh-" she stops, and he breaks into the silence.

"I didn't tell her I loved her."

"Oh." She looks somewhat taken aback and he's uncomfortable. "Okay."

"I didn't. Or I couldn't, I don't know. But I didn't."

"You mean...just now?"

"Just now. Last night. Yesterday."

Meredith just regards him quietly. When she speaks, it's tentative. "You said, before, uh, when I asked, that you weren't sure..."

"I wasn't."

"Oh." She pauses. "Sometimes it's complicated," she offers.

He shakes his head. "No. A person should be sure. A person should know that. A person should be able to say it."

Out of the corner of his eye he sees a candy-striper dressed as an elf, red belled hat and green turn-toed slippers, padding to the elevators with a sack of what he knows to be presents for the kids in pediatrics. It's the kind of details Addison would have loved.

It feels like a lifetime since he got the call. _How can it still be Christmas Day?_

* * *

><p><strong>Fifteen Years Earlier<strong>

* * *

><p>"So you actually found someone who loves Christmas as much as you do." Mark surveys the fully decorated living room, shaking his head. There are wreaths hung on the mantle, floating candles on all the windowsills, and a massive tree laced with silvery garlands and topped with a delicate porcelain angel.<p>

Derek grins. "I told you she was a catch."

"An actual gingerbread house." Mark looks somewhere between capitavated and horrified, running one finger along the intricately iced pieces of the tiny picket fence. "Marry her," he says, deadpan, and Derek grins.

"Mark, it's only been-"

Addison's back before Derek can finish. "Hey, be careful," she warns, and Mark snatches his hand back from the gingerbread house as if it's been burned.

"From the looks of this place, your folks must be nuts about Christmas too."

Addison nods distractedly and Derek slips an arm through hers, pulling her close. "Yeah," she murmurs. "Nuts."

"Where _are_ your folks, anyway?"

She shrugs. "My mother's in Europe. My father is - I'm not exactly sure. Probably in Connecticut."

"We're in Connecticut," Mark says, furrowing his brow.

"I mean, at his - at the house."

"As opposed to..."

"The country house," Addison says as if it makes perfect sense, and Derek's cheeks burn for her when Mark hoots gleefully.

"'The country house!' he mimics. "Get a load of Princess Di over here..."

Addison looked annoyed and Derek glares at his friend. Addison's sensitive about her family. Mark's _in_sensitive about practically everything. He looks from one to the other, not sure how best to smooth the situation. Mark, naturally, puts his foot in it again.

"Oh, forgot, can't be Princess Di. _She_ was pure as an angel until the day she married." He grins saucily at them and Derek throws him a stern look.

"Cut it out, Mark."

He casts a sideways glance at Addison, who seems somewhere between horrified and amused. Mark's his best friend, the closest thing to a brother he has, and Addison's been a good sport with his constant innuendo, but he also doesn't want to push his luck.

"Your parents getting back for Christmas?"

"Drop it, Mark," Derek mutters, and for once he does.

"So," he repeats. "You're a Christmas freak like this one, huh?"

"Nothing freaky about it," Derek interrupts, wrapping an arm around Addison. She beams at him. There's a piece of tinsel on the shoulder of her blue sweater; her cheeks are flushed. They arrived the previous day buzzing with plans: loads of packages, warm boots and gloves in case the possibility arose for a snowman, and a battered recipe book that Addison had borrowed from Naomi (who actually knew how to cook, so Derek was slightly concerned).

He finds Addison later that evening squinting over the book. Mark's in the spacious great room with the crossword puzzle, only whisking his feet off the coffee table when Addison sticks her head out of the kitchen. Now she's leaning on the counter with a ruffled apron over her jeans, wooden spoon in one hand, smudge of flour on her nose. Altogether adorable.

"How's it going in here?"

"Not as well as it should." She scowls.

"What are you trying to make?"

"Gingersnaps."

"That sounds...tricky," he offers.

"If you can read, you can cook," she counters, but she sounds uncertain.

"I'll help." They both look at Mark, who's appeared in the doorway.

"_You _can cook?"

"Hell no. That's for people who actually like the stuff. But baking - that's different. Baking's a science."

"It is?"

He whisks the book from her. "Just think of _these_ - " he taps the directions on the recipe - "as lab instructions."

Together they make actually passable gingersnaps - more than enough for his entire family; someone's stocked the kitchen with bags of white flour and sugar and molasses and stacks of new-looking silver baking trays. The whole house smells heavenly. Addison boxes the cooled cookies neatly in beribboned cases, carefully fastening a gift tag to each.

"We're a pretty good team," Mark observes, passing the boxed sweets to Derek as Addison finishes sealing them up. He and Mark load the car in the frosty darkness while Addison clears the dishes; they're driving to his mother's house in the morning. Derek sets the baked goods carefully in the backseat so they won't get squashed. They fill the trunk with presents for his nieces and nephews - Addison, armed with a list of names and ages, had delighted in helping him select the gifts - and neatly packed bags. And, because it's Mark, a sack of laundry. "Your mom expects it," he points out, not incorrectly.

"So what do you think of her?" Derek asks finally, closing the trunk with a firm swing. No need to say which _her _he means.

"This isn't the first time we've met."

"Well, no. But it's not class and it's not school. You know what I mean."

Mark nods.

"So?"

"I like her."

"Good." Derek jabs at the remote control until the horn sounds a quick beep to confirm all the doors are locked. "I like her too."

They hunker down against the unexpected chill - the house is heated, but even after fiddling with the furnace, it's not as warm as it could be. Addison bustles to the airing closet, tossing extra quilts at Mark. She pilfers Derek's old Bowdoin sweatshirt from his duffel and he grins, telling her to keep it. It looks better on her.

"I lied," Addison whispers late that night, when they're huddled together in the big master bedroom four-poster. Her cold toes seek his under the down comforter and he pulls her closer. "My parents don't really care about Christmas. I do, but they don't. They - the caretaker did the decorations and got the - stuff. Because I asked him to."

Her voice cracks on the last syllable and her vulnerability is his undoing. He pulls her even closer, until her flannel-clad legs hang between his, murmurs comfort into the warm skin at her neck.

"I didn't mean to lie."

"It doesn't matter," he whispers. "It doesn't matter, Addie."

"They don't care about it. They never did. I'm not even sure where they are." She pauses, and draws a deep breath. He can feel her diaphragm expanding on top of his, the soft swell of breast and firm expanse of ribs. "It's just - I just love Christmas so much."

Her hair is impossibly silky under his fingers. He smoothes his palm over her head, down her neck, rubbing circles on her spine. He feels her relax against him. "I love Christmas too," he murmurs.

"And I love you."

It's the first time he's said it but it slips out quick and soft. Like a habit. He presses his lips to her temple, wondering at the seriousness of the moment, but she's already fallen asleep. He strokes long hair away from her closed eyes and whispers "Merry Christmas" before letting himself drift off too.

* * *

><p>"Derek." Meredith is looking at him, her eyes gentle, but her stance professional. He swallows when he realizes what she's going to say. "The hospital is short-staffed. Because, you know, it's Christmas. They could call someone else, but - well, it's Christmas."<p>

"No." He shakes his head. She's a competent intern. Excellent, even. She can compartmentalize. She has distance. "It's fine."

"Dr. Shepherd?" He recognizes the other surgeon vaguely, from the burn unit. Lee. Liu. Something like that. He checks his lab coat: Liu. Dr. Liu nods at Meredith, hands her a file.

_Addison Montgomery-Shepherd, _it says at the top. He reads it twice.

But the hyphen isn't formalized; that's not her legal name. She wanted to take his name and she did, eleven years ago, keeping her maiden name as her middle name. People at the hospital in New York used both her names sometimes to distinguish them, but - there was no hyphen. Why did people do that automatically? Divide their surnames with a line where there should have been nothing between them? He considers asking. Considers saying something.

"Dr. Shepherd?" Liu is giving him an odd look.

"Yes." He struggles to focus.

"They're taking her up to radiology now. We just need to confirm - any major surgeries in the last five years?"

And there it is.

Liu continues to regard him curiously. Meredith is watching him too, her expression patiently searching.

_Addison, I'm sorry._

But he has to say it. She has the file anyway. There's no hiding it anymore.

"A Cesarean section with concomitant blood transfusion." His voice is quiet, his eyes trained on the floor, but he has no doubt they both heard. "Just over four years ago."

He can sense Meredith's expression change without even looking. He fights the urge to check: he knows he won't be able to stand the pity in her eyes.

So he turns and walks away, heart pounding, before she can say anything. All he can see around him are their eyes, both of them: Meredith's, full of pity and confusion. Addison's, haunted with fear and accusation.

Addison's eyes.

_They were the only visible part of her face: the surgical mask covered her elegant nose, her expressive mouth; the cap hid her bright hair. Just her eyes, pleading with him. "Derek, I need more time." When he looked away, all he could think of were feet. Her feet. Their son's feet. Those infinitesimal icy-white paws; he treasured every time he'd been able to stroke then with a tentative finger. His feet looked exactly like hers. They were tiny, smaller than the first joint of his finger, yet the resemblance was unmistakeable: the toes, the height of the arch, the curve of the heel. He wasn't even sure if she realized it. Those feet: the ones he massaged after a long day in surgery, buried in sand at the beach house, tickled as he teased her gently awake. "Please, Derek. Please ask them again." _

He feels his hands shaking as he strides down the hallway, ignoring anyone's attempt to get his attention. He sees her face again before him, slack and sedated, the way he still felt her gaze on him even after her eyes slid shut. A question, an accusation, it all blends together.

He doesn't know what he's doing. He doesn't know how. He can't explain why he simultaneously feels nothing and everything all at once.

With no idea where he's going, he continues to put one foot in front of the other, mechanically, with some thought of perhaps finding some water, some coffee, some sustenance beyond the thick air of pain and fear, when he turns the corner and freezes in his tracks.

_No. It can't be._

He has to look twice - an actual, honest-to-god double take - when he sees the man standing at the nurse's desk, a smirk all over his too-familiar face.

_It's not possible._

The man looks up and catches his eye. "Derek!" he calls out. "Merry Christmas!"

Derek stalks to the nurses' desk, ignores the stares and turns sharply on the unwelcome figure.

"What the _hell_ are you doing here?"

The other man's face darkens. "Why don't you ask your wife that question, Derek?"

His heart pounds. "Excuse me?"

"Or maybe you could ask the woman you fell in love with. I hear they're not one and the same anymore, eh?"

And for the first time since the hospital woke him early that morning, Derek knows exactly what to do next. Pulling back his hand, he smashes his fist right into the smirking face of his former best friend with a loud, satisfying _crunch._

_What God has joined together, let no man put asunder._

* * *

><p><em><strong>Reviews are warmly welcomed and greatly appreciated.<strong>_


	5. Chapter 5

**Author's Note**: _Thanks again for the reviews. I greatly appreciate all of them and - hey, no pressure - they do encourage me to update quickly. Keep it up - you guys are awesome, and I have a lot of interesting (I hope) things in store in the next few chapters. For those of you who asked, there will definitely be more Derek-and-Addison in real time as the story unfolds. I know this is moving slowly, but bear with it and (I hope) you will like what comes next. _

* * *

><p><strong>The Climbing Way<br>****Chapter Five**

* * *

><p>For just a second after his fist lands on his former best friend's face everything is silent. The world stands still. Then all hell breaks loose.<p>

Two uniformed officers get between them, pushing them apart, yelling at him to calm down.

Derek strains against the hand on his chest, his hand throbbing violently; Mark stands slack behind the other officer's arm, fingers pressed to the split on his cheek.

The chatter around them rises, accusatory whispers and not-so-subtle pointing.

_"Is he crazy?"_

_"Did you see the size of that guy?"_

_"It's Dr. Shepherd - he's the one whose-"_

The officer's hand is firm on Derek's chest. He tries to push past it and finds he can't.

"Where is she?" Mark demands.

Derek refuses to look at him. Even the timbre of his voice fills him with rage.

"_Where is she? _Goddamn it, Derek, if you-"

"She's in a CT tube!" He lets his temper get the better of him. "Someone gave her the bright idea to take off in the middle of the night and she got the hell beaten out of her for her car."

The shock that crosses Mark's face almost makes him feel guilty for saying it that way. Almost.

"Beaten? What the hell are you talking about?"

"Was it you? Did you tell her to take off last night?" He struggles against the officer's restraining hand and finds his arm jerked behind him.

"It's none of your business what I told her."

"Mark, I swear to God-"

"_What happened to her_?"

He takes a deep breath. "She was attacked. Carjacked. Someone - some _animal_ - made off with her car and left her for dead in the parking lot."

The color drains from his face. "Is she-"

"She's going to make it." He parrots the line that annoyed him and is equally annoyed to see Mark look just as irritated to hear it.

"What exactly-"

"Contusions, abrasions, a - a broken arm, some damage to her face-"

There's a small sound from Mark at the word _face_. Almost like a whimper.

_Dragged._ But he can't say the word. "And other things," he mutters finally.

"I'm sorry, man. I'm so sorry." Mark looks as shocked as he's ever seen him. All traces of the customary smirk are gone from his face. He looks, Derek realizes, like he's in pain. "I had no idea."

Derek swallows hard. "Just stay away from us. Just turn around and get out of here."

"Derek-"

But before he can say anything else Richard is there, thanking the officers, assuring them he'll keep the situation under control. Derek breathes heavily, trying to calm down, as a nurse he doesn't recognize timidly holds out an ice pack. He shakes his head.

"I'll take it from here." Richard gestures them down the hall, into an empty conference room.

The nurse hovers over his hand as he sits, trying to place the ice over his swelling hand. He brushes her off again.

Richard stalks across the room.

"Put that ice on your two million dollar a year hand," he scowls and Derek takes the cold pack from the nurse, who looks grateful to be able to leave. She closes the door behind her.

Richard looks slowly between Derek, who's slouched angrily in the farthest chair from Mark, holding the cold blue pack on his throbbing knuckles, and Mark, who has a piece of gauze pressed to the split in his cheekbone. Derek looks away from the spots of blood on the pristine white. Best friends. He's never hit him before. Never. It was Mark who taught him to throw a punch in the first place, when he was a skinny teenager with more eagerness than muscle tone; he gave him tips on his form while they took shots at the lightweight hanging bag in the Shepherd garage. Mark offered more than once to let him sock his face, he remembers, to see if he'd improved. But Derek could never bring himself to do it.

Richard sits down. "You want to tell me what's going on here?"

Derek realizes he's waiting for him.

"This is - Mark Sloan."

Richard nods, encouraging him to go on.

"He is - was - my _friend_." Derek puts ironic stress on the word. "In New York, we were all friends. Until-" he breaks off.

Mark's eyes flicker to him. Apparently, he realizes that Derek isn't going to finish. "Until Derek found Addison and me in bed together."

Richard looks grim. "Derek, your hands have more than just monetary value." His voice is quiet. "They save lives. They shouldn't be wasted - no matter how deserved," he adds pointedly.

He turns to Mark. "Look, I don't know what you're doing here, but this isn't-"

"I want to see her."

"Excuse me?"

"Addison. I want to see Addison."

"I'm afraid that's against hospital policy. Certain injuries carry a high risk of infection. No non-essential personnel in the room."

"But-"

"Of course her next-of-kin can authorize some limited exceptions to that policy, but you'll have to take it up with him."

Mark turns to him. "Derek..."

"You can't be serious."

"She would want to see me."

"What makes you so sure?"

"I know her." Derek snorts at this and Mark replies angrily: "I know things you don't know, Derek."

"What is that supposed to mean?"

"It means that you don't know as much as you think you know about what happened in New York."

"I know I caught you naked with my wife in my bed. I know you hightailed it out of there the second you saw me. And now I know you must have been the one to tell her it would be a good idea to sneak out in the middle of the night-"

"You don't know anything."

"I know she took off to do God-knows-what at your suggestion and almost got herself killed."

"And what do you think she should have done? Stayed with you?"

"I'm her husband."

"And you had just told her you were in love with another woman!"

He sees Richard raise his eyebrows slightly at that and ignores him. "That's not - this has nothing to do with you."

"It has everything to do with me. I love her."

Derek's cheeks burn. _How dare he. _As if Mark is capable of loving anyone. He leans forward in his chair. "If you say that to me again, I won't be held responsible for my actions."

Mark's voice is low but cutting. "Is that what you said to her, Derek? I saw all those cops out there - have you been telling them what a nice guy you are? She didn't make it to see me last night; are you so sure -"

"That's enough!" Richard looks as stern as Derek has seen him. "Now, Addison has a long road of recovery ahead of her and this - is not going to help anyone. Derek-"

He looks up.

"I'd like you to come with me." His voice is sympathetic, but firm.

Derek pushes his chair back, standing up with a parting glare at Mark.

Richard holds the door open for him, then turns back. "Mr...Sloan, was it?" Disgust creeps into his voice.

"_Doctor_ Sloan."

"Dr. Sloan, then. I trust you'll stay in here without further disregard for hospital policy."

Mark's jaw is set. "Fine."

"And just in case you forget," Richard continues calmly, "there's security posted in the hallway. Sit tight, and I'll send someone in to stitch you up."

"I can stitch myself up."

"Then I'll have someone bring you a mirror." Richard's tone is dismissive.

"Derek!"

He turns around. Mark's eyes are searching. Beseeching. "Just tell me, please, is she - is she -"

Derek narrows his eyes. "_He _was the first person she asked for," he spits. There's no need to say his name; Mark's face pales with obvious recognition. "Does that give you an idea of how well she's doing?"

The look in Mark's eyes is something like agony, but Derek ignores it and follows Richard out the door.

His former mentor doesn't speak until they've covered the full length of the hallway, and then it's just his name.

"I don't want to talk about it," he mutters as they walk.

"I just want to let you know that the scans are proceeding. She's holding on, Derek. She's strong."

He nods, eyes on the floor tiles.

_The incident discovered on hospital property._

"Are you all right?"

"Fine." He flexes his fingers carefully. "Nothing's broken."

"I don't mean your hand."

"I'm fine, Richard. Just - I want to see the films."

"Of course. As soon as they're ready. Derek-"

He looks up.

"The detectives want to speak with you again."

"Did they find something?"

"I don't know. Look, Derek, the hospital has lawyers-"

"Richard." His voice comes out faint with intensity. "I didn't do anything."

"Derek, for God's sake, do you really think I'm - I don't want to see you railroaded, that's all."

"I just want to help. If they need to clear me, fine."

"I understand, but - sometimes good intentions can backfire, Derek."

_Don't I know it._

"I'll be fine, Richard."

He asks the detectives the same question he asked Richard: "Did you find something?"

"Sit down." Bromley points at a chair, and he slides into it, more because of the steaming coffee cup on the table than anything else. His uninjured hand quivers slightly as he brings the cardboard cup to his lips.

"What happened to you?"

"I walked into a door."

"Very funny. You're a real joker, eh?"

He's silent, taking grateful swallows of the warm liquid. He feels the effect of the drink right away.

"Who was on the other end of that punch?"

_You don't know as much as you think you know._

"No one important."

"Are you a violent man, Derek?"

_Keep pushing and we'll see. _"I'm a doctor."

"You think those are mutually exclusive?"

"They are in my case."

Bromley takes a few paces to the other side of the table, flips through a few pages of his notepad.

"Shouldn't someone be looking for the people who did this?" Derek asks finally, pointedly.

"I can assure you we have a full team in place to investigate this crime. There are field officers pursuing leads outside this building right now. Pursuing every possibility," he adds. "Female doctor assaulted at a hospital on Christmas Eve? No stone is being left unturned here."

Derek nods. He wraps his uninjured hand around the warmth of the coffee cup.

"So. They tell you about the pattern of her injuries?"

He doesn't say anything.

"Victims who get dragged like that during an auto theft are usually trying to hold onto something."

He winces. No clinical detachment this time; it's something else entirely. Blunt. Raw.

He doesn't like it.

"She's savvy," he says finally, when he realizes they're still waiting. "Experienced, you know. We worked all hours in Manhattan, she - it wouldn't be like her to try to hold onto a car, or her bag, or..." he trails off.

Material possessions. At the end of the day, they are nothing.

_The trust fund, the money, all of it - it doesn't matter. You're all I need. _

"There isn't anything you can think of that would make her refuse to give up her car? Her purse?"

There is something. Not a _thing_, yet still the one thing she would value over her life. The one thing she did.

But he doesn't need to mention it, because it's not an issue anymore.

He looks the officer directly in the eye and speaks firmly: "Nothing."

They switch tactics, conversational again. He's tired, sipping numbly at the coffee and trying to focus.

"Where are her folks? Back east too?"

_Back east. _ That peculiar affection of the west coast. As if everyone living out here crossed the country in a covered wagon and is just waiting for the signal to return.

"They live in Connecticut."

"They coming out here?"

"I don't know." It's the safest answer.

"It's Christmas. Maybe she wanted to visit them?"

Under different circumstances, he would have laughed at the thought. He shakes his head instead.

"No plans to see your in-laws for the holidays?"

_Not on your life. _He shakes his head again.

"Speak up, please."

"No," he enunciates carefully, stopping just sort of insolent exaggeration. "We had no plans to see her parents for the holidays."

* * *

><p><strong>Eleven Years Earlier<strong>

* * *

><p>Inside the car, Frank Sinatra is warbling about coming home for Christmas. Outside the car, it looks like anything but home. Her fingers started tightening on the console when they passed the state line; by the time he eased the car onto the beginning of the seemingly endless private drive, her knuckles were noticeably white. He reached for her hand a few times, but she didn't seem to notice. Even with small white lights twinkling merrily from the evergreens surrounding the property, the estate looks forbidding. There's snow on the ground, crunching under the tires as they climb the long private drive that leads to the main house. He's come here only rarely and the feeling he gets as the estate comes into view is always the same: <em>Is it too late to turn back?<em>

But with marriage comes responsibility. Compromise. That's what his mother said, in one of her speeches that usually begins with _If your father were here, I think he would want me to... _Apparently marriage also gives you the ability to speak for the a deceased spouse. But it's not bad advice. It's hard, but it's not bad. They're married now, so things are different. More permanent, more serious.

They're still living in the rental on Central Park West, but they've begun to look for starter homes. A classic six, maybe. His wife has expensive taste and the trust fund to match, but they've agreed to build their married life from the ground up. As residents, they're paid in what feels like inverse proportion to the amount of hours they spend at the hospital. But things will change - well, some things. Just as they've spent the last four Christmases with his family, they'll do so again this year. Right after a stop in Greenwich at her parents' frosty estate.

It seemed like a good idea at the time.

_If your father were here, _his mother began, when she warned him not to let Addison feel like they were neglecting her family in favor of his.

So really it was his idea, and he suggested it to Addison. He felt benevolent when he did it; he liked making her happy. She'd balked, though, concerned about his family.

"We'll still see them. We can just drop in at your parents', if you'd like. Then we can drive to my mother's."

"I don't want to miss Christmas Eve."

But he assured her they wouldn't.

He wants to be a good son-in-law. He wants to be a good husband. And the flashing pager at his side reminds him how much he wants to be a good surgeon. He can do it all, though. It will take practice, and balance, but he can do it. He's sure of that.

As good ideas sometimes are, it's worse than he could have predicted. Standing alone in the marble hall, under a vast arched ceiling, with an untouched scotch in his hand, he regrets ever suggesting the visit. Truthfully, he has no idea how these cold, silent people and their cold, silent mansion produced his warm, vibrant wife. _Wife. _He's still getting used to the word.

Silently, he tracks from room to room, looking for her, reluctant to open closed doors after what they saw earlier that day.

He finds her at last in one of the seemingly endless upstairs bedrooms. Goddamn crazy rich people house, with more rooms than an army needs. He remembers her telling him that her mother did not permit crying outside one's bedroom. _What happened if you broke that rule? _he asked her. _Nothing,_ she mumbled, but he saw her fingers rise almost unconsciously and brush over the curve of her cheek.

This has to be the room. It's large and sterile, with few personal effects, but his eyes fall on the polaroid on the shelf. Addison as a kid: it makes his stomach twist when he looks at it. She still had that space between her front teeth she eventually grew out of, her hair an unmanaged tangle of strawberry blond. Freckles. But the eyes. The eyes look the same as when she reaches for him. When she needs something.

_Who did you reach for then, Addie? _

She's curled on the bed, facing away from him. Whether it's the king-sized mattress or the way her knees are drawn toward her chest, she looks smaller than he's used to, and it's disconcerting.

He sits down on the bed next to her, rests a hand on her hip. She rolls over to face him and he sees that her cheeks are streaked with tears. Her eyes are huge in the shadowed light: pale and shimmering, they're more green than blue.

"Addie." He cups her face, running his thumb gently across her cheekbone.

"It's Christmas. Why does he have to do this on Christmas?"

"I don't know." Her hair is damp and mussed and he smoothes it carefully away from her face.

"She's - my mother was in the house, Derek. She could have seen."

He just shakes his head, not wanting to make it worse. _First do no harm. _

"I don't want to be here."

"Then we'll leave."

When she looks up at him her eyes are bright. "Really?"

"Of course, Addison. You don't have to be here if you don't want to."

"You wanted to come-"

"I thought we should, but I - I'm sorry, Addie."

"No, don't be sorry, you didn't do anything -" and she starts to cry again.

He shushes her, stroking her arm until her breathing slows enough for her to speak again.

"I know you came here for me, and I thought I wanted to come too, but-"

"It's okay, Addie."

"He slipped. He said he just slipped, you know." She shakes her head. A tear slides down her cheek. She raises her hand, to brush it away or cover her face, he's not sure, but he catches it mid-flight and laces her fingers through his instead. Leaning closer, he brushes his lips against her skin, tasting the salt.

"You're good to me," she whispers.

"You deserve it."

Her eyes well up again and he touches his fingers to her lips. "What is it, Addie?"

"I don't want to slip," she chokes out. "I'm - I don't want to."

"You won't."

"But what if - what if I'm like him?"

"You're not."

"I'm scared," she confesses, and as her voice breaks he feels something crack within him.

"You don't have to be scared. You won't slip. But if you do slip, I'll catch you. I'll catch you before you fall."

She sobs once. He holds her hand firmly in his and after a moment she stops pulling at it, wraps her other arm around his neck and buries her face against him. He rocks her quietly.

_What did you do to her? _He asks her parents, silently. Wordlessly, he makes another vow: _I can't fix everything, maybe, but you're not going to take Christmas too. _

It's the last Christmas they visit her family.

* * *

><p>"So you just didn't notice her?"<p>

"Excuse me?"

"How is it that you didn't notice someone leaving a thirty-foot trailer? You really didn't wake up when she left, Derek?"

"We're doctors," he says simply. "Surgeons. We have to learn to sleep as deeply as possible when we can to get through residency. At ho-" he stops himself, surprised to hear the word, then corrects it quickly, "in New York, we left without waking each other plenty of times. You train yourself; it gets so only the pager will wake you."

The smaller one - Callaghan, gives him a sympathetic nod. Derek knows what he's doing, he's smart enough to recognize good cop/bad cop when he sees it, but too tired to care. Maybe that's the real genius behind that trick.

Bromley frowns. "You take statistics in college?"

"Yes."

"Aced it, I bet."

"I did fine."

"So, statistically speaking, do you know how many female crime victims are attacked by strangers? Vis-a-vis someone they know, that is - a partner." He places exaggerated stress on _vis-a-vis_, his message clear.

Derek blinks. "Yes. I'm aware. We volunteered at a DV shelter-" there's that word again, _we. _But it was _we. _He hadn't realized until they starting working at the fledgling clinic how many of the women escaping violent situations were pregnant. But there had been plenty of work for him too: while Addison cooed over babies and monitored in-utero growth patterns with a portable sonogram, he ran his fingers lightly over one damaged skull after another. Potential traumatic brain injuries. Fractures. Undiagnosed aneurysms. Neurological disturbances. In the cab home, or back to the hospital, every time, Addison would squeeze his hand wordlessly, holding on tighter than usual. He remembers it well. Especially the four-year-old girl with silky black hair who cried every time he came near her, asking him not to hurt her. Her brain had slowly been leaking blood since she'd been tossed down a flight of steps by the same man who'd broken her mother's ribs in the same place four times. He'd arranged for the child's surgery at Maimonides, free of charge. He scrubbed in, a pediatric neuro specialist taking the lead. She didn't make it: children are resilient, but not that resilient. They stopped volunteering there when Addison told him she was pregnant.

_When Addison was pregnant._

He laces his fingers together now, thinks of that little girl. _Marella. _That was her name. He thinks of the force it takes to break the bones in another person's face. He draws a deep breath. When he starts speaking again, his voice is steady. "I've treated victims of domestic violence, attended seminars on DV patient care. I studied traumatic brain injury for three years. I've published two case studies on ACOM aneurysms following intermittent patterns of assault. So yes, I'm aware."

"You sound sure."

_Actually, I'm not sure of much these days._

"Those are some bruised knuckles for a peacenik, Derek. You ever punch your wife like that?"

He stands up, pushing back his chair. "I don't have to take this."

"I thought you wanted to help."

"_Help _doesn't mean sitting here and taking this - abuse - while whoever did this to her is still out there."

"Sit down, Derek. If you want to help, sit down."

He sits heavily.

"All right. Let's backtrack."

_Again._

"So she gets up, leaves the _trailer_, and you're still sleeping."

"I didn't wake up until the hospital called me." He's been deposed enough times to know not to answer for anyone but himself.

"How do you suppose she got from the trailer to the hospital?"

"I don't know."

"We do."

He looks up. "What?"

"Turns out there aren't that many taxi dispatchers on Bainbridge. Just enough to remember a middle-of-the-night pickup from a waterfront trailer on Christmas Eve."

Derek swallows hard. "A taxi."

_I'll fly private. I'll get a hotel room. _

_Addison, slipping out quietly so he wouldn't wake. Calling a taxi, maybe sitting on the little porch outside the trailer. Calling Mark. _He draws a breath.

"We have the driver. Brought him in for questioning."

"What did he-"

"Says he drove her here, to the hospital, just like the call said. Left her in the parking lot, at her request."

Derek's mind races. "But he could be the one-"

"Turns out he's got an alibi of sorts."

"He does?"

"Says he left her at her car, went to the bar across the street. The owner-"

"Joe."

Bromley regards him with some interest. "Right. Joe. Remembers him. He remembers other things too."

Derek picks up on his tone. "Such as?"

"Such as you and the missus having a little bit of a scene in his bar last night."

Damn Joe and his honorable tendencies. Of course he'd tell everything he saw. He'd want to help. "It's not-"

"Let me guess. It's not what I think."

"Right."

"So she didn't say she didn't want to leave with you?"

He doesn't answer.

"You force her to leave with you?"

"No!"

"She just changed her mind?"

"Right."

_Let's just go outside, get some air. _She'd leaned heavily on him in the parking lot, silent in the car, unblinking over the bridge.

"You went home, went to sleep all lovey-dovey, she hightailed it out of there in the dead of night, called a taxi, and you never heard a thing. On Christmas Eve."

He doesn't respond.

"Where do you think she was headed, Derek?"

"I don't know."

"And you have no idea who could have attacked her."

"Of course not."

"You can't think of anyone who would want to hurt her?"

"No." He doesn't like the phrasing of it. _Hurt her. _It's too much of what he doesn't want to think about. The way her breath caught in her throat when they were touching her injured side. Her good hand, desperately grasping at air. The fact that someone did this to her.

"We've been asking around. I understand she's made quite an impression on the hospital in the short time she's been here. Funnily enough, no one here seems to think you were such a happy couple. You were pretty angry with her when she arrived, isn't that right, Derek?"

"Don't answer anything else."

He turns to see an unfamiliar face in the doorway. Business suit, sensible heels - Addison would call them ugly - and narrowed eyes.

"Detective, Dr. Shepherd is a respected neurosurgeon with the full support of this hospital. His wife is in critical condition and I'm sure you'll agree that we're all better served if he returns to her side now."

"What if I don't agree?"

"Then you can take it up with me. He's not answering any more questions right now." She turns to Derek, presses a card into his hand. "Go back to your wife. I'll be there soon to talk to you."

He hesitates, confused. "Go," she repeats. "I understand she's asking for you."

Bailey is standing outside Addison's room when he gets there. She looks over as he approaches. "They're just finishing her vitals. Give them a second. She was a champ for the scans." Her gaze falls onto the ice pack still resting on his hand. "Worth it?" is all she asks.

"I think so."

"Broken?"

"No."

"Good."

He stands silently beside her for a moment. He's seen the call sheet; he knows she wasn't on.

"You came in on Christmas. Even though you weren't scheduled."

"Sure did. My husband wasn't thrilled."

"But you came anyway."

"Yes, I did."

"For her."

"For her." She nods, looking at him with those intense dark eyes. "For her, and for you."

He swallows. "Dr. Bailey, I..." he breaks off, unable to finish.

"I know this is hard."

"It wouldn't be hard for you. You would be able to do this."

"You sure about that?"

"_You're_ sure." He looks at her: at her blunt, no-nonsense haircut and sturdy stance. "You _did _do it. In there. You helped her, when I - you helped her."

"It's different - it _is,_" she says when he shakes his head. "If that were Tucker in there on that bed, I don't know if I could have done the same thing."

"Tucker?"

"My husband," she says patiently. "It's different, when it's someone you love. No offense meant, because I like Addison very much. She saves babies and she's tough on my interns when they deserve it and let's face it, she's nice to look at. I'd like to think she could be a friend. But it's different when it's someone you love."

Someone you love.

_Christmas makes you want to be with people you love._

_So it does include me?_

_I didn't say that._

He sees her in his memory as clearly as if she stands in front of him now: covering her face with her hands, turning away. The slight movement in her shoulders that broadcasted her tears even as she tried to hide them.

_I don't know what the third option is. I just know I still love you._

He hears Mark's voice, sharp and insident_: I love her._

"Look, Shepherd -" Bailey's voice reorients him. "The way I see it, being sure is overrated. Maybe it's never going to happen. Fine. You don't need to be sure. You just need to get in there and you do what you can do."

"What if I don't know what I can do?"

"Then you can just be here. Someone needs to be here, and you're here. That's what you can do."

"Mark's here," he says quietly.

She doesn't ask who he is. "So I heard." She glances at his hand.

"She called him. Before, I mean."

Bailey doesn't answer. Inside the room, he sees Addison's foot twitch slightly under the sterile covering.

"He wants to see her. I could - maybe I should-" he stops. "I just don't know."

"You looking for advice?"

"I'll take it."

"Stop worrying so much about what you _should_ do, and just - be there. The rest will come naturally."

"And if it doesn't?

"Then it doesn't. But at least you've done something."

The door to Addison's room swings open. The team nods approval to him and he brushes past them, Bailey's advice ringing in his ears as he crosses the threshold. The large clock on the wall announces that only a few hours of Christmas remain. What's still to be seen, he muses as he approaches the barely stirring figure in the bed, is whether things can get any worse.

* * *

><p><strong><em>Reviews are warmly welcomed and greatly appreciated.<em>**


	6. Chapter 6

**Author's Note: **_Thank you, kind and lovely readers, for all your reviews. They're much appreciated and keep me on the ball getting this story updated. This is a ridiculously long chapter; the next 2-3 chapters will be a more reasonable length in order to keep the pace moving. Please keep letting me know your thoughts. Anonymous reviewers, I have no way to thank you personally for your reviews, but please keep going and know that I love reading them (Pobel21, you've left so many long and thought-out reviews - I wish I could PM my responses!). Oh, and benslerforever7, I hope your pinched nerve is better now, but if not, I hope the chapter helps at least a little. _

* * *

><p><strong>The Climbing Way<br>Chapter Six**

* * *

><p>He approaches the bed slowly. As he gets closer he sees that she's awake, her undamaged eye open. A nurse is leaning over her, saying something, and he sees her lips just barely move in response before he reaches her side.<p>

"Addie?"

She looks at him with that same vague recognition from earlier and he touches the undamaged portion of her face lightly, trying to orient her.

"Addison? Do you know where you are?"

"Hospital," she croaks.

"Right. Good." His fingers linger on her cheek. "And who am I?"

"Derek." She says his name with certainty. Firmly. _With this ring, I thee wed._

"Good." He smoothes her hair.

"I asked - I asked for you."

"And I came." He pulls the chair up beside her.

"But I don't- I'm not sure-" The visible parts of her face scrunch as she thinks. Her nose, undamaged: she always wrinkled it a bit when she was puzzling something out. Her voice is hoarse. The bowl of ice chips on the ledge has long since melted into water, but he's hesitant to give her more anyway, not sure how imminent surgery may be.

"What is it, Addie?"

"I can't - I can't remember. Why I'm here."

"It's okay."

"What happened to me?"

"Addison." He touches her good hand.

"Car," she says abruptly. Her face crinkles again. "Car - accident?" The words start to flow faster. "I was in a car accident? Derek-"

He takes her hand more firmly in both of his as her voice rises.

"Relax. Addison, you need to relax. You're going to be fine."

Her hand slides between his and he sees her face furrow one more time as her fingers glide across his swollen knuckles.

"What happened?" she asks again.

"You're going to be fine."

"No, to - to you. What happened to you? Your hand," she croaks, touching the swelling again. She doesn't - can't - lift her head, but her hand moves over his with the expert touch of a diagnostician.

"Nothing, Addie, I'm fine." Gently he disengages his fingers from hers. "Listen, some people want to ask you a few questions. I'll be right outside. If you want me to come back, just-"

"Ask," she interrupts him. Her mouth twitches.

"That's right." He stands, forcing down a sense of awkwardness to lean over and kiss her forehead, just below the first set of bandages and just above the second. Her skin feels cool and dry against his lips.

The investigators enter her room as he leaves. They pass each other wordlessly; he closes the door behind him.

Watching through the glass pane, he is struck - again - by a wave of uncertainty. Inside the private ICU room, the investigators are gently probing for details. Upstairs, he knows, the detectives still have questions about his own involvement. And somewhere in the hospital is Mark, who threatened him earlier. Mark, who destroyed his marriage. Mark, his former best friend.

_Mark was there, and I missed you, and now I'm sorry, Derek, I'm more sorry than you could possibly imagine._

_I don't know what I was thinking, it just happened!_

She called him. Getting a straight answer out of Mark is a lost cause. And Addison is in no position to tell him why.

_Please Derek, you have to give me a chance to explain!_

He flexes his throbbing fingers slightly, sees his own hands in front of him. Taking hold of her. Pushing her across the same threshold he'd carried her over nine years before. _You're really going to do this?_ She'd laughed then, taller than him in the high heels she loved, twining her wrists around his neck. _Are you questioning my strength? _he teased, growling into her neck as he slid an arm under her thighs, hoisting her up. She was easy to lift, lighter than she looked, and she folded her arms around him, helping. _Now you have to do this every day,_ she giggled, and he kissed her as he stepped through the open doorway into their new house. They were still kissing when he set her gently on her feet. When they pulled apart he tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear, marveled at the fact that he would get to look at her face every day for the rest of his life. _Welcome home._

He draws a deep breath, letting it rinse away the memory.

And what did Mark mean, before?

_You don't know as much as you think you know, about what happened in New York. You don't know anything._

It's so like Mark: Nervy. Inappropriate. And potentially more accurate than he'd like to consider.

Richard walks over to stand beside him at the window. "How's it going in there?"

Derek's answer is as honest as it is frustrating. Hours after he was called, it still hasn't changed. "I'm not sure." He rubs a tired hand through his hair. _No change. _It can be a reassuring diagnosis, or a terrifying one. It all depends on a number of factors he hasn't had the time to work out yet. So he sums it up again: "I'm just not sure."

"She's going to be okay."

Derek nods, swallowing hard. He can't be angry at Richard for those meaningless words; once glance at his former mentor's face tells him the platitude is as much for himself as it is for Derek.

"She's tough," Richard says then and Derek nods again. She is tough.

Too tough, sometimes.

* * *

><p><strong>Four Years Earlier<strong>

* * *

><p>He wakes up alone in his childhood bed, plaid coverlet twisted around his legs. She fell asleep beside him, he's sure of it: in flannel pajamas, curled gently away from his extended hands. She sleeps in socks here, but her toes still felt cold through the wool when they brushed his. She keeps saying the house is freezing.<p>

Now he toes into the ancient moccasins he keeps here, mindful of the chilly floorboards, and walks softly on the stairs to keep from waking anyone else up. Not everyone has their ability to sleep through everything except their pagers.

He thinks he can sense her presence before he sees her. Then she comes in to view: in the living room, cross-legged on the hearth carpet, in front of the large fireplace. Above her hang the family stockings, all the way from _Mom_, cross-stitched in cheerily crooked red by a school-aged Nancy decades ago, down to _Jackson,_ expertly fashioned by his mother for Kathleen's two-year-old. The youngest child in the family.

Addison addresses him without turning around and he's struck by the thought that she senses him there too.

"Your mother - she made one for him, didn't she."

He doesn't answer. He's wondered the same thing himself, concluded that she must have, before he was born, as she did with all the other grandchildren. What happened to the finished product is anyone's guess.

He walks slowly toward her. She's resting one arm around her midsection the way she does sometimes, as if she's still trying to protect something. It could be anything: The remembered swell of her belly. The infant she cradled too briefly in her arms. The incision that brought him into the world.

_Does it still hurt? _he asked her, only once, running a light finger over the marks. She ignored him then; now, she pushes his hands away from her stomach on the increasingly rarer occasions she allows him to touch her. The mark calls out to him, though. It stopped him in his tracks the last time: an angry red line, not nearly as faint as he'd expected it to be. Not quiet or soft, but almost never exposed: somehow, it was both as blatant and as hidden as their grief. He pressed his lips to it, following some instinct he couldn't identify, and she pushed him away, hard, the muscles under his mouth jerking violently. "Don't ever do that again," she hissed. He froze, backed away obediently, and they were finished. He hoisted the soft fleece pants back up to her waist - her stomach was still pocketed with a soft, loose patch that hadn't yet gone away, and comfortable sweats were her coverage of choice - and took to his side of the bed as if a wall divided them. Apparently a glutton for punishment, he spoke one more time before surrendering to sleep: "I thought it was healing nicely..." his voice trailed off when she turned on him with ice in her eyes. "You thought wrong," she snapped, rolled over and left him alone to contemplate healing.

That was nearly two months ago. Now she still hunches in that familiar position, her arm shielding pains real and phantom.

The air is thick and silent; his nose more than makes up for the work his ears are avoiding. The room is filled with pungent Christmas smells: the sweet tang of the cranberry bread his mother bakes by the dozen, the crisp pine of the tree, the gamey smell of the turkey. They'd made short work of it, all the assembled Shepherds. There was little but a carcass left. His mother knew what to do with it; it just looked like empty bones to him, but she turned it into soup.

She's waiting for him to say something. He knows it. _Say something! _the first time she screamed that at him, during a fight the decibels of which he remembers but not the cause, he was surprised. _I'm trying to think! _he'd bellowed back. It had been honest, anyway. Now he stands with hands bunched in his pockets as if he might find answers in there. What to say. How to say it.

He moves forward, drops cautiously to his haunches. She doesn't turn around, but he senses the shift around her as he gets closer. He can only see her in profile, and strands from her loose ponytail hide part of that, but tension radiates from her clenched jawline.

"Addison, it's-" but everything he has to say seems too small for what they feel. "It's okay to cry," he says finally. It sounds stupid, cliched and he regrets it almost as soon as it's out of his mouth.

He waits for her to snap at him, or to get up and walk away, but she just turns to face him. Her eyes are sea-green, swimming with unshed tears. They're always greener when she's upset.

_What color do you think his eyes will be? When he's older, I mean. Don't just say blue, Derek. I mean more than that. I mean what kind of blue. Think about it, okay? _

"You can cry anywhere, in this house..." He tries to keep his voice light, not taking his eyes off her.

She shakes her head, turning away.

"Addie." He reaches for her shoulder and she shrugs slightly, enough to keep his fingers skimming the loopy wool of her sweater. She's put a cardigan on over her pajamas. She's always cold lately.

He thinks about the words of the chaplain. The pastor. His mother. They sound hollow, he knows, but -

_Don't push each other away._

_There is nothing harder, but it will get easier._

"Stop saying that."

"Your name?"

"The crying - thing." He sees her fingers arc in the air, a gesture of frustration. "If I want to cry, I - I just don't want everyone standing around waiting for me to _break _or something."

"I don't think that's what-"

"Then stop saying it!"

"All right. I'm sorry." He gentles his tone. She's moody sometimes, unpredictable. _Hormones,_ they warned him. They can shift and sway for months afterwards.

"Ask her," she says after a moment.

"Hm?"

"Ask your mother. Where the stocking is."

"Addie..."

"That's what I want."

He sits back on his heels, unsure how to respond. This wasn't in the pamphlets they gave him. The counseling sessions he attended and Addison refused to join.

"If you want me to ask, I'll ask," he says finally.

"I want it."

"Okay, Addison."

"Don't placate me, Derek."

He sits there. He should be used to feeling helpless, but he's not. He doesn't know what to do with his hands. He's a surgeon and he should know what to do with them. In the OR, he always knows. At the hospital, there is no uncertainly. Just plan, observe, determine. Cut, suture, close.

"I'll ask for the stocking." He keeps his tone even. "Can we go back to bed now?"

He might as well have said nothing. She sits unmoving in front of the fireplace. "Addison."

Tentatively he inches closer until they're besides each other and reaches his arm out. As she did earlier that night, she allows him to wrap his arm around her, but she doesn't relax against him. He rubs her arm, pressing his lips to the top of her head. She feels tense; she stiffens further when he tries to massage the tight muscles at her neck.

"Addie..."

"Derek, stop," she murmurs.

"Stop what?" It's a legitimate question: Touching her? Talking to her?

But she won't, or can't, answer.

"Addie, look-" But he breaks off before he can finish. It seems pointless to say _Don't do this. Don't push me away. _He has the distinct feeling he's already away.

"His stocking should be up there," she says, almost too softly for him to hear.

"Okay. We'll ask Mom. If she has it, we'll take it with us." He's relieved, now: a plan of action.

"No." She shakes her head firmly against him, her chin brushing his shoulder.

"You don't want to take it with us?" Uncertainty again. He closes his eyes briefly.

"It doesn't matter."

He responds more to the bleakness in her tone than the words: "Addison, don't say that."

_The worst thing is not to talk about it_, they told him. _It doesn't matter so much what you say, as long as you keep talking. _

He stumbles, tries to backtrack. "Sorry, just - just tell me what you mean."

"I mean it doesn't matter."

"But I thought you wanted it-"

"I wanted it here!" Her voice is a loud burst, startling him. She pulls away; he lets her. "I wanted it _here,_" she repeats, jabbing a finger at the fireplace. Her eyes are dry now, tearless. "I want it here. I want _him _here. I want him _here._"

She stops talking as abruptly as she started.

He starts to reach for her, gets the sense he can't cross the chasm and lets his hand drop.

"I know," he whispers. "I know he was supposed to be here. But Addison, _we're_ here. We're still here."

It sounds more hollow than anything else he's tried tonight, because once he says it he realizes the painful truth: that he's not actually sure if he believes it.

* * *

><p><em>I just don't want everyone standing around waiting for me to <em>_break __or something..._

_Waiting for Addison to break. _When it had happened - and it did happen - it had been somehow more and less spectacular than they'd predicted. Than they'd feared. It happened and then it became another thing they didn't talk about.

"Dr. Shepherd?"

He and Richard both look up to see the investigators exiting Addison's room, closing the door behind them.

"Does she -"

The investigator shakes her head before Derek can finish. "She has no memory at all of the attack. We worked to try to place her last memory - it may be yesterday, but it's not clear. She thinks she was working at the hospital that day."

She looks at Derek for confirmation and he nods.

"She said something about a surgery for a frontal lobe - I'm not sure if that's one of her patients, or..."

_How's Mr. Epstein's frontal lobe?_

_He woke up smiling._

"It's one of mine, actually," he murmurs distractedly.

_It's Christmas, Derek. We love Christmas. Or at least we used to._

"And she remembers a baby."

His mouth dries. "A baby?"

"Delivering a baby. She couldn't remember any more specific details about the delivery. I don't know if you can pinpoint that to yesterday or not."

He can't. It could be any day in her profession. More importantly, he never asked her what she'd done that day. She could have delivered triplets or separated fetal blood vessels or performed a hysterectomy for all he knew.

"She was, uh-" He can't think of any deliveries other than the quints. "I'm not sure."

_Because you performed one of the surgeries._

The investigator is studying him sympathetically.

"She doesn't know why she was in the parking lot or where she was heading. You were the last one to speak with her?"

"Yes, I-" He cuts himself off. _Son of a bitch. _"No, actually, it was - a friend."

"Name?"

"Mark Sloan."

"Do you know where I can reach him?"

"He's here. In the hospital."

"Okay." She nods. "I'll want to speak with him."

Of course. _That's going to go well. _He hears Mark's accusatory voice in his head again.

_And what do you think she should have done? Stayed with you?_

"Did you tell her?" he asks.

"No. She may remember something on her own that could help us, or if you'd prefer, you can take her through it."

"She may remember still."

"Yes. Sometimes the brain - well, I don't have to tell you about the brain, I guess."

He nods. Hears himself, yesterday: _There's a lot we don't know about the brain._

She gives him another sympathetic smile. "You can go in now. We'll be around, and we'll want to talk to her again, but for now she's all yours."

_Is she?_

Derek clears his throat, thanking the investigator, and rests a hand on the door.

"Go ahead, Derek." Richard nods at him. "I"ll be out here if - well, you just go ahead."

"Addison?" He sits in the empty chair by her bed, takes her good hand in his. What's surprising is that it's already such an automatic posture. Not comfortable, but familiar.

She looks exhausted. The human body is resilient, built to withstand many things, but it requires rest in order to heal. Her visible eye flutters closed every ten seconds or so, an effect of the painkillers they've dosed her with and the sleep her body desperately needs. He's already learned the uninjured spots he can touch: her uninjured cheek and jaw, her good hand and arm.

Her voice is faint when she finally speaks. Hoarse. "I could - couldn't remember."

"It's okay." He cups her hands between his.

"What happened to me?" Her hand lifts weakly toward the bandaged portion of her face.

"Addie, don't." He catches her wrist, drawing her arm carefully back to her side.

"It doesn't hurt." Her voice is soft with wonder.

He touches her cheek lightly. "You're on some painkillers."

_That's an understatement._

"Please - tell me. What happened?" Her fingers clench around his.

He hears a tap on the glass and looks up at the welcome interruption. Richard is outside the door. He mouths one word: _scans._

"Derek, I-"

"Addison, you need to try to rest. Everything is going to be fine. I'm going to go for a little while, and then I'll be back. There'll be a nurse in here if you need anything."

Richard holds the door open for him as he exits. "How is she?"

"Pretty out of it. She's asking what happened."

"What did you tell her?"

_Nothing. I walked away. _

"Well, you knocked before I could answer, so..." Derek feels a momentary flash of guilt for Richard's expression, and changes the subject. "How do the scans look?"

"I haven't seen them, but they should be up any minute." Richard leads him to a viewing station and departs with a reminder to page him if he needs anything.

Derek perches on the rolling stool for a moment, then stands up. He drums his fingers on the viewing station, impatient. What's taking so long? He checks his watch again. Then out of the corner of his eyes he sees the flash of a sandy ponytail. Meredith, approaching with an armful of folders, mostly hidden by the barrier of privacy curtains.

But when he looks up a second time he sees two heads instead of one.

Mark. Instantly recognizable even over the curtains. He's tall enough for his face to be visible. When he catches sight of Derek he turns quickly and walks away.

Meredith strides to him bearing a large folder.

"Here you go. Sorry this took so-"

"What were you doing? Were you talking to him? _Don't _talk to him," he finishes sharply before she can answer.

She widens her eyes. "Derek..."

"I can't believe this. He has some nerve, showing up here, and then corralling you-what was he even doing back here?"

"_Derek_."

"What was he saying? What did he want from you?"

"He was asking about Addison," she says slowly. "He wanted to know how she was."

"Well, I certainly hope you didn't tell him anything."

"I took the same HIPAA course you did, Derek. Of course I didn't tell him anything. But he seemed-" she breaks off.

"What?"

"Concerned. He seemed really concerned about her."

"Too concerned."

"Maybe. Derek," she says gently. "Is it so bad to have more people here, rooting for her? You did say you were all friends, in-"

She stops, maybe at his look. He doesn't respond.

When she starts again, her tone is somewhat less tentative: "I think, if it were me, I'd want people here. If it were me in that bed."

_If it were her._

"Meredith, you don't-"

She holds up a hand, stopping him. "-understand. I know. I can't possibly understand. I'm just saying, that's all."

Wordlessly, he holds out his open palm for the pictures and she hands them over.

She doesn't leave, though. She stands in front of him, waiting. It's a familiar posture. The only boy in a family of six, it seemed women were always standing in front of him, waiting for him to do something. You run circles around all of us, Nancy once said. Around all the women in your life. They'll wait until he talks. Silence is no weapon for them.

He lifts his eyes, giving in. An opening.

"If you want to talk," she begins quietly, then trails off. That scratchy, unpolished timbre of her voice touches him. He shakes his head, pressing his lips together. It seems very important to stay silent just now.

"I know I'm not a friend - well, but I could be. A friend, I mean."

He looks up.

"You have a wife. I know. And she's - well, you can't - and Mark was your best friend. I know that. And you're clearly not going to talk to him. So I could be one. If you want, I mean."

"A friend?"

"A friend."

He hesitates, one hand on the closed folder of films. "I don't know."

"Okay." She sets the rest of the folders down on the desk, hands him the technical code for to open the images on the computer. "It's an open offer."

"Meredith?"

She looks up.

"Thank you."

She nods briefly and departs, pulling the privacy curtain shut once more.

He turns on the lightbox on the desk, adjusts his glasses and begins reviewing the scans.

It's part of his job to reconstruct scenarios from the pictures he sees. A ten-millimeter dilation, for example, is more than an anomaly, it's a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. First, it's the pathology that creates the symptom. Second, his evaluation and diagnosis. Finally, the treatment, with resulting prognosis. The prognosis could be improved function. Limited viability. Total recovery.

Death.

He studies the pictures carefully. The zygomatic and orbital fractures tell a story he doesn't want to hear. He distances himself, reviews the pictures like a doctor instead of a husband. Blunt trauma, with enough force to break bone. Her cheekbone. Her eye socket. From the pattern of the breaks, she was hit more than once. In the face.

The compound fracture of her arm. He slows automatically as the skull fracture comes into view. This he reviews closely, with well-trained eyes. It's clean, with no indication of bleeding.

He thinks, unwillingly, of the thousands of scans he's reviewed from assault victims. Sometimes he was the only person who could put together the story of the injuries. Memories the brain couldn't willingly recall could be - with the right experience, the right approach - drawn instead from pictures like these: the coils, the hidden folds and sprouting arteries.

He can do this. He can be a doctor, look at these pictures, and take a physician's impression of what she went through in the parking lot.

But that's all he can do. He thinks of Meredith's words and he feels alone. Mark's out of the picture. It only took Addison a few weeks at Seattle Grace to win over their colleagues - typically. She was the victim and he was the villain and what she did to him seemed to vanish. He closes his eyes and sees the scans float in front of them again. The zygomatic bone: a fist, driving into her face.

_I want to go home, Derek!_

He hears the squeak of the curtains and then Meredith's in front of him again. "Here - the last set of scans." She puts the films down on the desk, then pauses. "Derek, are you okay?"

He lets himself lean slightly against the desk, propping up his elbows, more tired than he realized. He opens his mouth to respond-

"Isn't this cozy."

Derek pushes away from the desk automatically, annoyed with himself for taking the bait.

"Didn't Chief Webber tell you to stay put, Mark?" He stands, eye to eye with his former best friend.

"I just wanted to say hello to your girlfriend. I thought we could get to know each other."

Derek counts to ten in his head and, when that fails, clenches his sore hand hard around his blackberry.

"I don't think this is a good time," Meredith says quietly, and Derek remembers that she's unusually good at dealing with patients. Especially the irrational ones.

But Mark just smirks. "Get a load of mini-Addison." He whistles softly.

Derek finds his voice: "Shut up, Mark."

"He has a type. Derek does. Or hadn't you noticed?" Mark gives her a predatory sort of smile.

Meredith stands uneasily between them.

"Blue eyes, good cheekbones, smarter than him but somehow willing to put up with his crap..."

"Are you trying to get punched again?"

Mark runs his fingers over the neat sutures on his cheekbone. "Just trying to get reacquainted with my old friend. It's been a few months since you packed all your crap in the middle of the night and took off."

"Maybe I don't want you to know me anymore."

"I think I'll check on Addison's labs," Meredith interjects quietly.

Mark watches her walk away. "She's cute. Kind of an Addison-lite, you know? A little mouthy, but still appropriately worshipful of the Great Derek Shepherd?"

"Shut up."

"Come on, Derek. You always introduce me to your girlfriends."

"And look how well that turned out the last time."

"Look." Mark's tone changes, his whisper fierce. "I flew three thousand miles. You won't let me anywhere near Addison. What do you expect me to do?"

"You could start by staying away from me."

"You're just going to keep acting like the husband here?"

"I _am_ the husband. Not sure why this is such a difficult concept for you to grasp."

"You did a great job of that last night."

He wills his blood pressure down. "You would have done better? Kept this from happening?"

"She wouldn't have had to take off in the middle of the night if I were there. I could have protected-"

"Excuse me, you're the great protector?" Derek snorts, cutting him off. "The last time I saw you was your bare ass heading down my stairs after I walked in on you screwing my wife. Not so interested in looking out for her then, were you?"

"I guess I didn't realize I had to." Mark looks at him coldly. "I didn't know how you were going to handle it. You didn't give a shit about her by then, so forgive me for thinking you wouldn't really mind."

"Don't you dare tell me how I felt about her."

"It's painfully obvious. It doesn't even need to be said."

"Then shut the hell up and _don't_ say it."

"And what about your protection, Derek? Do the police know you threw her out of her own house? DId you happen to tell them that?"

"Shut up, Mark, I'm warning you."

"Her feet were a mess. I bet you didn't know that."

"Shut up, Mark!"

"You ever get shoved outside barefoot? Lots of shit on those steps, Derek. When was the last time you swept out there, anyway? When was the last time you were even home, you son of a-"

"Excuse me." The hesitant, husky voice startles him. He turns, breathing heavily. Meredith is looking at him uncertainly, twisting her fingers. He has no idea how much she heard.

"Yes," he says brusquely, trying to calm himself, trying not to look at Mark.

"I, uh, just need that folder right there." She gestures to the file in Derek's hand and he passes it to her, consciously evening out his breathing.

"Any news?"

"The team is meeting now." Her gaze flickers to Mark, the back to Derek. "If you want to join them-"

"I do." Mark interrupts.

"Forget it." Derek shakes his head incredulously.

"You know how good I am at what I do. I worked with Kipling in New York - anyone else on her team do that? Derek, at least let me see the scans. Maybe I can help."

Derek looks at him. The smirk is gone now, but not the anger. It's still there, just slightly different. Desperate. He thinks about the films he reviewed, the two broken bones in her face. The way her hand had floated up to try to touch her injured face.

"_Derek. _Do you really hate me more than you care about her?"

The question hangs in the air and then he turns to Meredith.

"He can see the scans."

Mark exhales heavily. "Thank you."

He ignores him, focusing on Meredith. "Only the scans, nothing else. And he's not allowed-"

"-anywhere near her," Mark finishes for him. "Fine. Let's just see those scans."

Derek and Meredith exchange glances. With an expression he can't quite identify, she nods her head at Mark, turning on her heel. "Come with me and I'll set you up in a viewing room."

Derek calls after them: "And make sure he stays there."

He's heading toward his office, intending to call the scans up on his computer for some further analysis before discussing the care plan with Addison's surgical team, when he hears his name.

He looks up to see an unfamiliar female officer approaching with a file in her hand and feels a gnawing discomfort in his stomach. He's not sure if he can take much more interrogation. Then he's ashamed of himself for his weakness. Addison is in a hospital bed, fighting for her life, and he's the one questioning how much more he can stand. He swallows hard.

"Her surgical team is meeting," he says briefly, gesturing vaguely toward the elevators. "I said I would stop in-"

"Dr. Shepherd." She's slightly out of breath. "They think they found the car."

His heart flutters. "They did?"

"The plates were already stripped, but it matches the description. We need you to take a look at some pictures."

"Of course."

They show him a picture of the car and he swallows hard. It certainly looks like hers, the flashy little coupe she'd leased at least in part - he's sure of that - to annoy him. He's never liked showy cars, always far more comfortable in the beat-up jeep they kept for trips to the island - the one he drove out here.

"It looks like her car."

"They found some items inside. They've been bagged and tagged, but if you can take a look, maybe it will help you identify the car."

He nods, then looks again at the picture of the car.

Something in the backseat catches his eye. "What's-" The officer reaches for the picture but he holds onto it. "What is that?"

The officer doesn't answer.

He stares at the object. "It looks like a-"

"It's a tire iron."

A tire iron. Jesus.

"It could have been much worse," the officer says gently.

He's getting tired of hearing that.

"Based on the damage, it seems like she ducked, and -"

"And held up her arm." Derek pieces it together slowly, out loud. Not because he doesn't understand. But because he doesn't want to.

"Exactly. Which was very smart."

"She is smart."

The officer smiles sympathetically. "I understand this is upsetting to see. But finding the weapon is actually a good thing - it may help us find your wife's attackers. We'll be able to test it for prints, for matter and fibers and-"

"Is that blood?" He holds the picture closer, studies the dark patches on the metal instrument.

"Yes." Her voice is quiet.

He's silent, holding the picture. It feels almost as if there's a part of her still in that car and he's reluctant to let go.

"Dr. Shepherd, we are going to do everything we can to catch the people who did this."

"They, uh," he clears his throat, handing back the picture. "They were seen? Someone saw them?"

"Two men were observed parking the car."

"They couldn't catch them?" He feels the ignorance of the question on his tongue, but can't help himself. He'd rather ask questions like a simpleton than think about two men- than think about anything.

She shakes her head. "Unfortunately, they were gone before the officers questioned the witness."

"And they just - abandoned the car?"

She nods. "Most likely they got nervous when they heard about the search."

He thinks of Addison at her car, opening the door, thinking about - he's not sure the answer to that. Him? Mark? Something else entirely? But distracted. Maybe because of him. He thinks of the amount of force it takes to do the kind of damage he observed. And for what? To steal a car. A wallet of credit cards too easily traced to use. Seeing the car abandoned like that makes a muscle in his jaw tense. He thinks of Addison, waiting for surgery, still not sure what happened to her.

Why would they do this?

He doesn't realize he's spoken it aloud until the officer's words interrupt his thoughts: "I wish I had an answer for you. Unfortunately, without anything else to go on, it may just be a random act of violence. I know that doesn't help."

No. It doesn't.

"Dr. Shepherd?"

"Yes." He shakes his head slightly, clearing it.

"Can you identify any of these objects as belonging to your wife?"

They hand him her personal effects, encased in plastic evidence bags. The first few objects are immediately familiar from all the times he's driven with her in the past: neatly folded maps (Addison didn't leave directions to chance), expensive sunglasses (which he knows to be her spare pair), and a pack of antibacterial hand wipes that he knows she keeps discreetly tucked into the console. He runs his finger along the package through the thin plastic material. The case is purple; they smell like lavender. The same ones she's always used. They make him remember more than he'd like to: Cleaning up coffee spills in traffic on endless trips out to the Hamptons. Lifting her fingers from the console and kissing them, his lips tingling from the astringent.

A whole car, reduced to a few plastic evidence bags.

He nods as he examines each bag, then hands it back to the officer.

"Yes. These are her things."

The officer nods. "There's one more." He passes a flat plastic bag into Derek's hand and, as he looks, everything falls into place.

_Victims who get dragged like that during an auto theft are usually trying to hold onto something._

Now he understands, why she wouldn't get out of the car even when she must have been ordered to. Why she didn't let go, when her safety was at stake. She's only ever valued one thing over her own life.

He would recognize it anywhere.

"Dr. Shepherd..."

But when he looks up all he sees is the clock on the wall. Five minutes past midnight.

Christmas is finally over.

* * *

><p><strong><em>Reviews are warmly welcomed and greatly appreciated.<em>**

In the next chapter (since you all waited so patiently for this one): Addison is prepared for surgery and has a request of her own, more backstory about Rowan, and the police talk to Mark.


	7. Chapter 7

**Author's Note: **_Oh, look. It's the shorter chapter I promised, except it's really long. Well, these things happen. Everyone who's reviewed, thank you and please keep it up - I'll just be all manipulative and say that it makes me update faster. (It's true, though!)_

* * *

><p><strong>The Climbing Way<br>Chapter Seven**

* * *

><p>Five minutes past midnight. Christmas is over now. Everything else, just beginning.<p>

He holds the edges of the plastic bag carefully, almost reverentially. A flat rectangle of red woven cloth with frayed edges. Clusters of embroidered mistletoe - _French knots. _ How does he remember that? Someone must have told him at some point. Then the lettering. Large block letters, the type a young child can read, divided by silver stars.

Large, blocked and unfinished:

R*O*W*A*

"You...recognize it?"

_Anywhere._

Derek holds it gently aloft between his fingers.

"It belongs to your wife?"

He nods, and this time no one snaps at him to speak up. They wait, and they keep waiting. They wait long enough for the larger detective who'd been questioning him - Bromley - to join them.

Finally Derek speaks.

"It was - well, it would have been - it's part of a stocking."

"A stocking?"

"A Christmas stocking."

_Ask your mother. That's what I want._

They're still waiting. "She - well, my mother, uh, does this part - embroiders it, I guess, and then sews it into a stocking. When it's finished."

Bromley looks at him, his head cocked. "I'm not following. I'm sorry."

He draws a deep breath.

"I think this is what she-"

_She's still holding on, Derek. You have to talk to her. You have to help her let go. _

They're still waiting. The air in the hall is hot and close. He takes a deep breath, and says the words:

"We had a son."

He can feel their knowing exhalations of breath.

"He was born prematurely."

_To be a good surgeon, you need to learn distance._

_Cut, suture, close._

_The incident discovered on hospital property._

"His internal organs were underdeveloped. He lived for ... six days."

He doesn't have to meet the detectives' eyes to know what their faces will look like. It's the Tragedy Olympics, special baby version. They'll win. They always win

"I'm very sorry."

The detective gestures at the strip of red cloth. "So this is -"

"It's his, it just - it wasn't finished. You can see here where she made the first stitch for the N. It, uh, it would have been his name."

Except that they ran out of time.

The detective frowns at the letters, reads aloud: "Row-"

Derek cuts him off before he can speak the name: "Rowan."

It's the first time he's said his son's name aloud in - long enough for it to taste strange on his tongue. Unfamiliar.

Rowan.

_Rowan Christopher Montgomery Shepherd_.

They went back and forth on names for weeks. He found two middle names pretentious; she considered hyphenated surnames tacky. She lobbied for Rowan - "It works for a boy _or _a girl," she beamed, prompting him to question why that mattered when they would find the sex out halfway through the pregnancy anyway. At her scowl he kissed her, assured her he liked the name just fine. Truthfully, he preferred _Christopher Rowan_, but she insisted Rowan Christopher was the better choice.

"Otherwise it sounds too much like Christopher Robin," she pointed out.

"Who?" he asked, and she shook her head in amazement.

"Christopher Robin? The Hundred Acre Wood? Winnie the Pooh?" He shook his head to indicate his lack of recognition. "Honey, these are things you're going to have to know when your son is born."

Her tone was light, teasing, but it stuck with him. He slipped out of the hospital on a rare break, bought the _Winnie the Pooh Treasury_ at Barnes and Noble and left it in the nursery for her as a surprise. She was asleep when he got home the next night but when he crawled into bed after her she rolled over into his arms and molded herself to him, all long limbs and growing belly, and whispered: _I love it_.

During the agonizing six days their son lived, he read to him from the book while Addison slowly regained her strength.

Neither of them managed to speak at his funeral. Not publicly, and not to each other. But the pastor read from A.A. Milne: _Promise me you'll never forget me, because if I thought you would, I'd never leave._

As he listened to the muffled sounds from the pews surrounding him and maintained a grip at his wife's ramrod-stiff back, the painful parallel washed over him like tears. Rowan, the pastor seemed to be saying, had been able to let go because he knew his parents would always remember him.

_Promise me you'll never forget me, because if I thought you would, I'd never leave. _

What would his son think now of that promise? Would it seem that, like so many others, it had been broken?

_I didn't forget you. _The thought rises unbidden, fierce. _It was just too hard._

So I just stopped remembering.

But this is what he has learned: that sometimes you don't have to _do_ anything to break a promise. A promise can be broken just as easily by doing nothing at all.

The detective's voice cuts into his thoughts: "Your wife - newborns are her specialty, is that right?"

_Thanks for twisting the knife, Detective._ "Yes," he says briefly.

"Losing a baby like that must have been terrible. I'm sorry to hear it."

Canned words. Canned thoughts.

The thing is, they don't even know the worst part. But at least they've stopped asking questions.

"Thank you," Derek says briefly.

When he looks up, the expression in the detectives' eyes is familiar. Pity. Understanding. Like he gets them. Understands what they went through. It's how people look when they know.

With the painful click of something falling into place, he wonders if that's one of the things that drew him so strongly to Meredith.

She didn't know.

He swallows hard on the unwelcome thought that this is no longer the case.

"Can I keep it?" he asks quietly, still holding the evidence bag. The words stick in his throat.

"I'm sorry, Dr. Shepherd, but it's evidence and we need to preserve the chain of custody."

Oh. Of course. He keeps his tone as even as he can, fingers the familiar embroidery through the plastic. "After the, um-"

"We'll take good care of it until the investigation is closed," the detective says kindly, holding out a large palm. Carefully, Derek passes over the bag.

It always feels like too soon to say good-bye.

He walks slowly down the hall, feeling disconnected from time and space. The embroidery. The red cloth. The last time he'd seen it - but now here it is again. It followed them here, like everything else he thought he could leave behind in New York.

He has the feeling he remembers as an intern, that he is moving slowly while the rest of the hospital speeds around him. Exhaustion. He knows, clinically, that he should sleep at some point. He meets briefly with the surgical team first and confirms they'll start first thing in the morning. She's been dosed with medication to ensure she sleeps tonight, but he can see her before she goes to pre-op.

He sets an alarm, stretches out on a less-than-comfortable on-call room bed, and forces himself to sleep. To be a surgeon, you have to be able to sleep even when you don't want to. You can't cut if you can't concentrate and you can't concentrate if you don't steal every last possible moment to let your body regenerate itself.

The sleep is thankfully dreamless. Three hours, just like that: and then the morning light wakes him. He's slept alone at a hospital more nights than he can count, but he's also slept beside Addison for the better part of the last decade and a half. He forgets she's not there sometimes, like a phantom limb, and he rolls over alone in the narrow bed, rises, and tracks the bustling halls to her secluded room.

Liu is walking out of Addison's room as he approaches.

"How is she?"

"Vitals are holding. She's awake. They're going to take her down for prep in a few minutes."

Her visible eye is closed when he walks in, despite the doctor's comment, and he takes a moment to study her face. As he has been trained to do, he looks at the covered flesh and sees the images he reviewed onscreen. The damage underneath. He's comfortable with the plan: they're going to deal with the compound fracture of her arm and the burn team will do some exploratory work on the damage to her right side. The bones in her face will be preliminarily set in this initial procedure, with more work to come. He watches her chest right and fall under the blanket. He doesn't know how aware she is, and the responsibility of telling her settles on him like a weight.

He's reaching a hand toward her, intending to touch her good arm, when her uninjured eye opens. Soft pale blue today, almost no hint of green.

"Derek?" her voice is soft.

"Hi." He adjusts the blanket so it's even, covering her up to the neck with just her good left arm exposed.

"Are - are my parents here?" she asks, just like the last time. He touches her hand lightly. Just like the last time, he wonders whether the truth or a lie will hurt her more.

"No," he says quietly. "They're not."

She blinks, lifting her chin in a kind of half nod.

"Do you want me to call them?" It's been so long - more than four years - he's not sure what he'll do if she says yes.

"No, I - they're busy. I don't - it's too far."

"Because we're in Seattle." He searches her face for recognition. "You know that, right?"

"Seattle," she repeats slowly. "I know."

He brushes her fingers again. "What else do you remember, Addie?"

Her eyes remain open, technically, but any readable expression within them disappears. "I don't know."

He knows her and he knows the effects of sedation and he can tell the difference. He studies her face and waits, and she says nothing. But like so many times in their marriage, he lets the lie go. He hopes this one won't fester. He just looks at her, thinking of the red square of embroidery cloth, the unfinished name. Thinks of her stashing it in the rental car, refusing to leave without it. Almost giving up her life for it. They'll have to talk about it eventually, perhaps. But - also like many times in their marriage - he chooses to talk about medicine instead.

"Addison, they're going to prep you for surgery. Did Dr. Liu explain everything?"

"Yeah." Her lips curve in what could be a smile if her face were less swollen. "You going to watch?"

He turns her fingers over carefully in his hand. "Do you want me to?"

"No. I don't know. I-"

"It's okay." He releases her hand and touches her cheek gently. "Just - I don't want you to worry about anything until you're out, okay?"

"What if I don't - if I still can't remember what happened?" Her eyes search his. She wants absolution, he thinks, the forgiveness he's withheld since the night he slammed the the door of their brownstone behind him.

"If you don't remember, then you don't remember."

It's the best he can do.

"I'm so tired, I..." Her visible eye flutters shut again. "Is it -" the eye opens. "Is it bad, Derek?"

"You have a good team, Addison. A great team. They're going to take care of you. Everything's going to be fine."

He leans over her, intending to kiss her forehead, and she blinks. "Archer."

"Addison." Alarmed, he taps lightly at her cheek. "Look at me. Who am I?"

"No, I - I want you to - call him. Archer. Will you call him?"

He hesitates only for a second. "Of course. If you want me to."

"Derek, be - nice to him."

He runs his thumb lightly over her uninjured cheekbone. "I'm glad you can still nag me when you're half sedated. I think it's a good sign for your recovery."

She makes that half smile again.

"Are you trying to laugh?" His fingers linger on her cheek. He's always loved the softness of her skin. He bites down the thought, tries not to think of her injuries.

"I still have a... sense of humor." Her words are labored, but she sounds, underneath it, like herself. He smiles back at her.

"Good. I'm glad." He looks up to see a resident and a nurse at the window waiting for his signal. "They're going to take you in now. I'll be here when you wake up."

"Derek, wait!" she closes her fingers around his hand anxiously as he pulls back and he leans over her.

"Hey, calm down."

Her voice is a whisper. "I'm sorry."

"It's okay. What did you want to tell me, Addie?"

Her voice is even softer this time; he has to put his face very close to hers to hear her words: "That _is_ what I wanted to tell you."

Her eye is welling up and he dabs lightly at it with the back of his fingers.

It's easier to distance himself when she's not speaking, when he's evaluating her sleeping form or the scans of her injuries as he would any patient. When she talks - when it's her inimitable voice; really, it was that voice that first drew him to her - then it's harder to pretend it's anyone but Addison under the disfiguring bandages and swelling.

He brings his face closer to hers, makes quiet shushing sounds. "I want you to relax now. Can you do that for me? Everything else can wait."

She nods, very slightly, and he presses his lips to her forehead. "Good."

He watches them roll her away and the he stands in her empty room, one hand resting on the cold plastic rail of her bed. Addison in surgery. He shakes his head.

* * *

><p><strong>Four and a Half Years Earlier<strong>

* * *

><p>"Where is she?"<p>

Chief Herman stops him with a hand on his chest. "Shepherd, slow down. _Shepherd!"_

"Is she all right? What happened?"

"She collapsed in the OR. There was a rupture-" Derek falls silent as he explains.

"Can I see her?" The words scratch his throat.

"She's already under. Shepherd, we don't have much time. You need to decide what you want to do."

"Tell me again." He holds the pen so tightly he fears for a moment it might snap in two. "The choices."

"We can do a Palmer - try to repair the tear." The Head of Neonatal. He knows her, but he's never spoken to her like this. Her voice is patient but urgent. "It's risky, but it does sometimes allow the baby to remain in utero longer. She's barely at twenty-three weeks. There's a possibility we could give the baby more time to grow. Or we can deliver now."

"The risks - of the surgery?"

"The baby could lose blood flow during the procedure. And she could - there are risks. She could bleed out. Sepsis. There's a risk of mortality."

"How high a risk?"

"A higher risk than most people would be willing to take."

"And if we deliver?"

"We transfuse her and stop the blood loss, but the baby will have to survive on its own. Twenty-three weeks is the cusp of viability. And we won't be able to analyze if any congenital issues are present until after delivery."

He stands frozen. All the planning, the Consumer Reports on cribs, the baby-proofing expert they'd hired as half a laugh, all the preparation, the certainty they could have it all, and he's powerless to make a decision.

Chief Herman stands by his side; the head of Neonatal, her arms folded, is waiting.

"If it were my wife, my child - I would sign," the Chief says quietly.

He's sitting alone with his head in his hands when the familiar voices intrude on the silence.

"Derek! We came as soon as - how is she?"

He sits up slowly. "She's in surgery. They're -"

"What happened?"

He shakes his head. "I don't know, Mom. It just - sometimes these things just happen."

She touches his hand. "I'm so sorry."

"Thanks."

"Do you want me to try her parents again, honey?"

He shakes his head.

"Derek." Nancy's there too, and she hugs him. He's too preoccupied to put his arms around her, but what he notices when she pulls back is that there are tears in his eyes. In the eyes of his sister, the experienced obstetrician, and that - more than anything - is what the curdles the anxiety in his stomach into true terror.

He grips the back of a chair, tries to control his breathing. In front of him, his mother's broad, kind face is lined with worry. She fiddles with something in her purse; a corner of red fabric peeks up from the battered black leather. He watches her rub it between two fingers and finally asks.

"What is that?"

"Nothing." She stuffs it back inside her bag hurriedly. "I was just working on - it's nothing."

"Can we do anything?" Nancy hovers.

"No." He shakes his head. "We just have to let the surgeons do their job."

* * *

><p><em>Let the surgeons to their job. <em>He thinks about this as he leaves her room. They'll let him know before they start operating, so he can watch if he still wants to.

He sees Mark - the hospital feels like a maze today, like he can't avoid anything. Or maybe he doesn't want to avoid him, because to his surprise, Mark is sitting where he's supposed to be - at the viewing table - and his posture looks defeated.

_Derek, I'm so sorry, man. I saw the board, I came as soon as I got out of the OR. I don't understand what happened._

_Me neither_, he'd said then. Or had it been: _Neither do we._ Not that different, really.

Or maybe it made all the difference in the world.

"How is she?" Mark asks now, all trace of mocking gone from his tone.

"Same." Derek sees Bailey approaching and nods for her to join them. "Surgery's this morning."

"Who's on the team?"

Bailey looks at Derek, who nods his approval tiredly. "Glazer's supervising. Vincent. Liu."

"Glazer's good." Mark pauses. "He's good, but I'm better."

Bailey cuts in: "Dr. Sloan, I don't know how you do it in New York, but as I know Chief Webber told you, we do not allow patients in this hospital to be treated by family, close friends or - whatever it is that you are."

"So what can I-"

"If Derek okays it, you can watch from the gallery with him."

Mark jerks his thumb at Bailey, turning to Derek. "Am I wrong or is she just a resident?"

Derek shrugs, catching what almost looks like a wink from Bailey. "Welcome to Seattle."

Mark opens his mouth, then closes it. Finally, he turns back to Derek. "Can I watch?"

Derek looks away from his pleading eyes, nodding shortly. "Fine. Someone will let you know when it's time."

"Thank you for the scans," Mark says quietly.

Derek nods shortly.

"Did you tell Addison that I'm-"

"Don't push it, Mark."

As Mark walks off, Bailey looks with interest at Derek.

"I let him see the scans," Derek admits.

Bailey doesn't say anything.

"Mark - I let him see the scans," he says again when she doesn't respond.

She nods. "I guess you care about her more than you hate him."

"Yeah, I - wait, what did you say?" He frowns. "That's what Mark said."

She turns wide eyes on him, shrugging. "I guess it's a popular thought."

"Dr. Bailey-"

"I'm just going to go check on the pre-op team."

"Dr. Bailey!"

She disappears, crossing paths with Meredith, who's carrying what he now recognizes as Addison's file. He nods at her.

"You scrubbing in?"

"I don't know."

He nods, accepting it. "Have you slept?"

"Have you?"

He shrugs. "Enough."

"You let him look at the scans," she says quietly.

He nods.

"That was - he does seem to know what he's doing."

"I see you talked to Mark."

"No - well, a little. Just when he was looking at the scans."

"Did he-" Derek breaks off, unsure how to end the sentence. _Behave? _No, that's not right.

"He was all business. There was an orderly with him."

"Not a female orderly, I hope."

Meredith smiles tiredly. "A guy, actually."

"Good."

"He said he's the best at what he does."

"Have you met a surgeon yet who doesn't say that?"

"No." She laughs shortly. "Is it true? For him?"

He nods reluctantly. "He's very good. In the OR, that is."

"Are you going to let him talk to the team?"

"It's only exploratory at this point - the part he'd be concerned about. Before the second - well, if he has insights, he can bring them to me."

"Right." She nods. "Are you - how are you doing?"

There's no real answer to that, of course. He taps distractedly at the wheel of his blackberry.

"I'm sorry about everything."

He glances up at her now. Everyone's sorry. "Everything?" he repeats.

"Well, Addison, and - having Mark here. I know that's - hard for you."

Derek nods. "He was my best friend. Well," he allows himself one mirthless chuckle, "so was she. So, you know." He pauses. "Things change."

She nods. "Yeah. I do know."

* * *

><p><strong>Three Years Earlier<strong>

* * *

><p>"You could have called."<p>

Her words slam into him like the door he releases, hard, letting a gust of winter wind blow it closed with a resounding crash.

"I'm tired. Let's not argue." His cheeks are burning from the central heat in the foyer, still cold under the skin. It's chilly mid-December. It will be Christmas soon, and if that doesn't improve her mood - nothing will.

Typically, she chooses only to address the first part: "Well, I'm tired too."

"Addison." He sighs. "I have been standing in an OR for the last nine hours."

"And what do you think I'm doing when I'm in the OR, Derek? Sitting in a rocking chair with a fetus, playing pat-a-cake and feeding it strained peas?"

There's a moment of silence, her jab too close to the thing they don't talk about, and he attempts to make a joke even though he knows he should accept the night's a lost cause.

"So you really don't find brain surgery impressive at all?"

"You think this is funny?"

"_No,_ Addison." He keeps his tone as patient as possible, despite the headache growing at the bridge of his nose. "I think it's ridiculous. I said I was sorry-"

"No."

"Excuse me?"

"You actually didn't say you were sorry. You said you were tired."

"I am tired."

"But not sorry."

"Addison."

"Just want to be clear."

He looks her up and down briefly. Her posture seems poised for a fight. He's anything but. "I'm going to bed."

"Because you're tired."

"Exactly."

"But not sorry."

_I'm sorry I came home at all. _

The thought surprises him. He's not a man normally surprised by his own instincts. He's a thinker, a planner, and he pauses for a minute to see if he can gauge when banter, or maybe nagging, started to turn into a real argument. They'd been arguing less, lately, but - she's standing there, brow quirked, waiting for him to say something. He steps forward and kisses her cheek.

"Good night."

"Are you punishing me for Connecticut, Derek?" She calls it after him as he approaches the staircase. He doesn't turn around. "Because I'm not changing my mind."

_Of course not._

He hears her behind him as he climbs the stairs, but doesn't turn around.

"Derek. Are you listening to me?"

He pauses outside the door to their bedroom, stops her with a hand on her shoulder. His mother liked to tell him never to go to bed angry. But he's not angry, exactly. He's just - tired.

"I have to be up in four hours, Addison. I need sleep. I need _quiet._"

She looks stung and he regrets it for a moment until she starts in again.

"What about what I need?"

"Can it wait another night, please?"

"Of course it can. It's waited all this time."

He chooses to read her sarcasm as sincerity and releases her shoulder, opening the bedroom door.

Her movements are fast and furious as she readies herself for bed, disappears into the en-suite and doesn't come out until he's already under the covers, most of the room in darkness except for her bedside lamp. She slides under the covers, the rasp of silk against cotton sheets. She's wearing those shiny, slippery red pajamas that make it impossible to hold onto her - not that he plans to make any attempts tonight - the ones he used to jokingly call her _stop sign. _

"Addie."

"Now you want to talk?" Her voice sounds muffled.

"Your lamp."

"Oh. Of course."

His eyes are screwed tight against the glare, but he hears the pull and release of the chain as the room descends into welcome darkness and even more welcome silence. He's nearly asleep, half his mind walking through the steps of the craniotomy he's performing in the morning, when he hears it.

Another sound escapes from her side of the bed and he presses his fingers to the bridge of his nose, willing away his annoyance. When he opens his eyes, there's just enough moonlight to see shadowy silhouettes: her face pressed into her pillow, not muffling everything.

"_Addison._" He sighs. It's so like her. He counts to ten, silently.

"Addison, stop."

She ignores him.

Rolling onto his side, he reaches across the bed to touch her shaking shoulder and she pulls away. His fingers slide off the silky fabric. Frustrated, he drops back against his pillows.

_What does she want from me?_

"I'm still doing this. I'm not changing my mind." The words are muffled by her pillow and he lets them linger unanswered, doesn't try to touch her again.

He pretends her sniffles are white noise and his guilt is exhaustion as he drifts off to sleep.

He doesn't see her again for two days. They're on reverse schedules, one procedure after another, and when they finally pass each other on the third floor hallway of the hospital it could be dawn or dusk. Her open white coat reveals a shiny blue dress and her heels so high he has to tilt his chin to kiss her cheek.

"Rain check?"

She shrugs, looking at her blackberry. "Probably too difficult to plan. We'll just do it spontaneously next time we're both off."

He's somewhat taken aback, but pleased. "Well, that's ... very understanding of you."

She slides her blackberry into the pocket of her lab coat. "Don't sound so surprised."

Her shoes are loud on the linoleum floors.

She doesn't change her mind.

* * *

><p>Meredith is watching him with an expression he can't identify. "So I'm, uh, I think I'm not going to scrub in."<p>

"Oh." So she's decided. "Why not? It could be an interesting procedure."

"I think it's probably better if I don't. I've been here twenty-four hours; I'm still on the case, I just - well, I can watch."

"Derek!" Mark's voice interrupts before he can answer Meredith. He's striding toward Derek, Bailey hot on his heels.

"I need to talk to the surgical team."

"Forget it. I said you could see the scans. She has a highly trained team and I've reviewed their plan. They don't need you in there, Mark."

"She needs me."

Derek closes his sore fist in the pocket of his lab coat, hard. "_She _is in good hands."

Mark meets his eyes. "The police talked to me."

"I heard. I'm sure you told them all sorts of terrible things about me."

"Nothing but. I'm supposed to go talk to them again after she - well, after she's in surgery."

"Good for you."

Bailey looks from one of them to the other. "If you two don't mind, I'm going to head down to the OR."

"I want in," Mark insists.

Bailey raises an eyebrow. "

"I thought we already discussed this issue."

"I think it was still open," Mark begins and Derek turns away in frustration, grateful when Bailey handles it.

"Look, Dr. - Sloan, I don't know you. I don't know what you and Addison may or may not have talked about. But she's married to Dr. Shepherd. She is seriously injured. Her medical decisions are in his hands. If you want a role in her recovery, you'd better figure out a way to make sure it doesn't interfere with the work of this hospital or the wishes of her medical proxy."

He looks down. "I just want to see her."

"I'm sure you do, but that doesn't mean you _get_ to see her. And if this -" she gestures between the two men - "squabble, or spat, or whatever it is interferes with her care, I'm going to have to ask you to leave the hospital."

"Fine. Forget the squabble. But if I can't get in there, then I need to talk to you before she goes into surgery."

"To me," Bailey repeats doubtfully. Mark nods.

Bailey looks at the clock. "You have... four minutes, then. Go."

Mark glances sideways at Derek. "Alone."

Derek raises his eyebrows. "Excuse me?"

"Dr. Sloan, I can't ask her husband-"

"Dr. Bailey, please trust me on this."

"Yes, you should - he's very trustworthy," Derek interjects dryly.

Bailey looks from one of them to the other.

"_Please_." Mark's face is set, serious.

Derek shakes his head. "Fine," he says, but he doesn't move. Mark reaches for Bailey's arm, then draws it back before making contact and leads her instead with a jerk of his chin. They're far enough away that Derek can't hear, and he stands fuming quietly, wondering why Mark still can't get out of their marriage. Why he's still a part of them, despite traveling three thousand miles.

_They called you?_

_It's not like you were answering your pager, Derek._

Sometimes things you don't talk about can tie you together more than you'd think. He lets himself remember for a moment, losing himself in his thoughts. His head snaps up when they separate.

Bailey's expression is blank and neutral.

"What is it?" Derek looks from one of them to the other, annoyed. "Dr. Bailey-"

"Dr. Shepherd, I'm going to go scrub in."

"Can someone please tell me what's going on here?"

Bailey's expression doesn't change. "I need to go scrub in."

Derek stands helplessly as she walks away. Once again, he has no idea what's going on.

What information could Mark possibly have to give to Bailey that she wouldn't in turn share with Derek?

He looks again from Mark's flushed face - he won't meet his eye - to Bailey's retreating back.

He tracks what he knows in his mind, takes apart the information like the highly-trained surgeon he is:

Information the surgical team might need. Information Mark knows - that Derek _doesn't_ know. That Bailey won't release to Derek, even though he's her husband.

For a flash of a second it crosses his mind - only a second - _pregnant? _- but no, it can't be: he tamps that down when he remembers he's seen the evidence she's not, shaking his head at his own ridiculous assumption. But then what could-

_Oh._

Like in the OR, it just clicks into place.

And then, for the second time in recent memory, everything he knows just shifts.

* * *

><p><strong><em>Reviews are warmly welcomed and greatly appreciated. Haven't reviewed before? Surprise me and say hi.<em>**

Next time: Derek deals with what he learned at the end of this chapter. Also: more about Mark's conversation with the police, more present-day Addison as she comes out of surgery, and additional insight into Mark, Addison and Derek in New York.


	8. Chapter 8

**Author's Note:**_ Thank you so much to everyone who's reminded me about this story and anyone who's still reading. I took a bit of a hiatus but I expect to update this story more regularly now, and I hope you'll continue to read and let me know what you think._

* * *

><p><strong>The Climbing Way<br>****Chapter Eight**

* * *

><p><em>And then, for the second time in recent memory, everything he knows just shifts. <em>

"Derek!"

He keeps walking.

Mark catches up, tags alongside him. "Derek, would you just wait a minute-"

He doesn't wait. He can't believe this. After everything he sacrificed to try to make things work, the entire foundation has been built on a lie.

"I'm not an idiot, Mark," he says icily.

"You could have fooled me."

His sore fingers clench. "I'm not in the mood."

"Too bad. I'm not a slave to your moods, Derek. It would take a fucking fortune teller to keep up with you anyway."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means I'm not Addison."

Still walking fast, he turns a corner. "Don't mention her name to me."

Mark sighs, still following him. "Derek. Don't do this. It has nothing to do with you-"

"Oh, really? Nothing to do with me?"

"It was my - it was mine."

"Yes, thank you, I can do the math. But-" and he almost stops himself, continues anyway - "How sure are you, really? It's not like she's been honest-"

"You're an ass, Derek," he spits. They both stop walking, as if by mutual agreement. "Okay, maybe you're worried about her - although you certainly didn't spare a second to worry about her by the time you left New York - but fine, let's just say you're worried. You're the husband, you get the leeway. I get it. But this is not about you. Look, the team needed to know and I didn't know whether she told you."

"She didn't."

"Well, yeah, I got that now. Turns out it was in her file anyway, but I just needed to make sure."

They stand for a moment, not looking at each other.

"Is there anything else you two have been keeping from me that I should know about?" he asks finally.

Silence.

Derek grimaces. "That's just perfect."

"Okay, look, Derek, I know I'm risking another right hook - although I'll tell you right now, if you try it again, I'll hit back this time - but I'm gonna go ahead and say it. And then I'll walk away before you do, even though I know that's your specialty."

"What are you babbling about now, Mark?"

"Ask yourself this, Derek: what are you really so mad about? The fact that she didn't tell you about the abortion or the fact that you can't leave her for it now that she's fighting for her life?"

And just as he said he would, Mark turns on his heel and walks away, leaving Derek open-mouthed, alone, and not at all certain of the answer.

He leans against the wall, seeks support in cold plaster. Escape from this - secret. One more thing she didn't tell him. One more weight in his arms and he's drowning in it; he lets go just enough to push off the wall and start moving, blindly, anywhere but here.

_Walk away, Derek. It's what you do best. _

He parts a sea of white coats, doorways blurring, his purposeful stride swallowing one hallway after another. Someone might have called after him but he's past hearing it now.

Faintly sticky linoleum and three sets of stairs and now he grips the railing and squints until he can't see the Sound anymore. Remembers another hospital, another railing, staring out at the East River until the changing blues and greys were as impossible to pin down as the color of her eyes. She's here. She's everywhere, and he can't think. From two floors above he can still see the doors she burst into, characteristic black and heels - she relished those extra inches and the power they gave her - right before she drove a stake through _starting over_.

Addison, here in this hospital. Stalking up to him on spear-sharp shoes, wearing fur like a weapon - how could he have known?

Blood-red lips agonizing close to his ear, the murmur she knew drove him wild, _of course she would notice his hair._

Laughing on Richard's bed, pressing her mouth closed when she saw him, just the tip of her tongue escaping.

The way her lab coat felt under his fingers, coarse and heartbeat warm, as he pulled her around the corner for the oxymoron of privacy in the hospital.

He thinks of her body - mostly arcing away from his at first, a challenge. The way she bent over him in the NICU rocking chair, arms inside out along his. Touching him with her lips and nothing else. So many secrets and so much unsaid between them, but this - this he hadn't anticipated.

Automatically, he looks for clues.

Her hesitation that first night, in the trailer, had it been about something else? Her skin was cold over warm, rain-chilled when he first touched her, covering explosive heat. He peeled back damp layers and curled his fingers through familiar satin. The motion of his hips was rote, painting patterns a hundred times old. Yet there was an unspoken awareness, painful, of who had touched each of them most recently. It was more than mental: she was larger than life under his hands, twin swells of softness filling his palms, iron strength in the thighs that clenched around him. She took up more of the bed. She took up more of _him; _he was exhausted afterwards, and her cool surgeon's fingers wound their way into the longer hair at the nape of his neck. _I love you,_ she whispered into sweat-salt skin and he buried his face in sheets that didn't smell like her and said less than nothing. It was still raining outside. Her long hair, darker red where it was damp, everywhere. Afterwards, she curled into him like a question mark, seeking his heat, and he wrapped a numb arm across her back like he was supposed to. It felt swollen, heavy, like it didn't belong to him. She was facing away from him when he woke up, one of her palms flat against the concave wall of the trailer. Like she was measuring it, maybe, in her sleep, or trying to find a way out.

Clues, though? She walked back into his life three months ago and he had no idea. None. He remembers long-ago med school - _We're doctors, Nai. Why wouldn't we want to learn how to do everything? _And there she is in his mind, against his will. Spread out on the table, a scalpel slicing the marked swell of her belly. Wrapped in bandages the night before, barely recognizable. Then in New York, in a room he doesn't know, erasing all traces of a secret he was probably never meant to know.

"Hey."

He flinches in spite of himself. "If you know what's good for you, you'll keep walking."

Mark doesn't: he strides right up next to him. "Wallowing in self-pity?"

"Go away, Mark."

"Have you even called your mother?"

Derek blinks at the non-sequitur. "Excuse me?"

"I'm sure she's waiting for you to call. She'd want to know. You're not the only one who cares about Addison, Derek."

"That's not your concern."

"I'm going to go watch - they're starting soon. You do what you want, Derek."

_You always do._

But he knows Mark is right about his mother, at least, and he takes advantage of the relative privacy to make the call.

It's not Christmas anymore, but that alone wouldn't worry his mother. He's been in little touch since moving out here; she'd expect him to be working, most likely. Last year Addison went without him. Four missed calls. He dials the familiar numbers.

"Derek? We've been waiting for your call. Better late than never, I suppose - Merry Christmas!"

He can't say the words. "You too," he manages. Then he exhales hard, not sure where to begin. He could have made this call yesterday. He could have made it before they shifted his world again, left him to put together-

"What's going on? You sound - Derek, is everything all right?"

"It's Addison, Mom." She draws sharp breath, just like the last time. And just like the last time, he says it again: "Something's happened to Addison."

"_It's too early - it's much too early. I - of course I called her parents. I can't reach them. They're - I don't know where they are. I talked to some - secretary or other. Look, Mom, I don't know if - just hurry." _

"Oh, honey," his mother says now, just like the last time. "Tell me what I can do to help and I'll be there."

"I don't know," he says, for the umpteenth time in the last day and a half. He fills her in as briefly as possible, keeping the more graphic details to himself. "I don't know, Mom. I'll keep you posted."

He doesn't know what he can do - how can he tell someone else what to do?

Each step taking him further from surety, he makes his way to the gallery. Then he stands outside the door like an intern on day one, like he hasn't seen a thousand bodies draped in blue shroud and split under a scalpel. Is it his fault that opening doors hasn't felt the same since?

"Derek?" Meredith has pushed the door half open. "Do you - did you want to come in?"

Her wide-set eyes are soft with pity. When he doesn't move she walks out beside him, letting the door swing shut. "Derek-"

Pity and something else.

"You knew." Acid stings his throat.

Her brow furrows slightly. "I-

"You have her medical file."

"Derek."

"You didn't say anything."

"_Derek._"

"You're my-"

"Don't finish that sentence." She closes her eyes briefly. "She is your wife. I am her doctor. You are her husband. Those are the only things that anyone here _is_."

"You should have told me."

"You really think so," she says, almost conversationally. "Derek, I am a doctor. I am _her _doctor. The rules don't stop applying because you're married to her."

"Since when do you follow all the rules?"

"Stop."

He's sick of it all, sick of rules, sick of the waiting game that feels almost like fear in his throat. He rests a steadying hand on the wall and then Mark is there, again. Three thousand miles and he can't get away from any of them.

"Show's on," Mark says simply and somehow it barely sounds disrespectful coming from him. Derek looks away as he walks inside, not wanting to see the neat sutures on his cheekbone or the judgment in his pale eyes. One by one they take their seats and Derek waits for the macabre theatre to block out his thoughts.

Meredith's pager goes off before she's even settled in her seat (a respectful three empty seats down from his). "I'm sorry," she murmurs as she passes him, her hand stopping inches from his shoulder as she makes her way out.

There's a sea of blue below him, equipment and nurses as familiar to him as the back of his own hand. It's no different, he tells himself.

So he regards her with a clinician's eye, but somehow that gaze is redirected on its way into the brightly lit operating theatre. Somewhere between patient and table she's not anonymous anymore, not just another patient. He fights it. He tries. But despite something near his best efforts, he looks at her and sees not a carefully draped body to be cut into but the face he first saw so may years ago.

It's the drapes. That's what gets him. They learned it together, in medical school: why you drape a body before you cut. Gross Anatomy class-

_I'm not putting that lyric in, Mark! It's a wedding, not a rugby game. Be serious._

- that's where they were all taught it together. There's a human instinct against cutting into another human like that. We drape them to bury that instinct, to separate our own humanity from theirs. They didn't mention whether it was doctor or patient who becomes less human in the process; Derek has his own ideas on the matter.

_Wear old clothes_, they told them the first day, before the inaugural lab. Something you don't mind throwing out, because everything is going to smell like formaldehyde and nothing will recover. Everything is going to feel like death. She was wearing a battered pair of sweats and an old tee shirt that marked her clearly as a crown as a child of privilege: a faded track & field tee shirt from Girls Academy. He'd grown up only a few dozen miles away, down the proverbial tracks in the old Connecticut mill towns that had seen better days. Even in that threadbare grey shirt she'd looked beautiful, shrugged self-consciously when she saw him looking. "They said to wear old clothes," she murmured, head tilted with that affectation so many tall women seem to share, ponytail curving like a request. It would be one of the last times he saw her looking less than coordinated. One day he'd remember the messy high ponytail, the way the sweats clung to the line of her leg and feel despairingly, irrevocably old. That morning even mudged safety goggles couldn't hide her vivid eyes, and they smiled at him before they got started, with genuine excitement at learning that hit him right in the gut. _We should agree on a name first, though,_ she said seriously and he was the first of their small group to catch her eye and nod.

_In her eyes I saw my life_

Shiny silver instruments pass from hand to hand and then from hand to flesh.

_I knew that she would be my wife_

The door swings violently shut behind him.

Bent over, hands on knees, he waits for his breath to return. Bile rises in his throat.

"Derek." Mark is talking to him, fingers inches from his arm. "Derek, you okay?"

Of course I'm okay, he wants to snap. I'm not the one on the table. I wasn't beaten or dragged or ... they're treating him, he realizes, like the husband. This fraternal back and forth with Mark, it hasn't died yet. The terrible words they've exchanged don't seem to replace that give and take, the ebb and flow of years of knowing each other. They'd wrestle in the yard, and later argue over girls - _maybe he should have known then_ - but they'd still pass the salt at dinner.

He tries now to speak and is embarrassed yet again at his own failings. "She - she's-"

"She's going to pull through." Mark exhales hard. "They've got this under control. Look, you don't need to see this."

His breath is loud in his ears. He looks into his former friend's eyes now, almost eager for judgment at his cowardice and sees something far more terrifying.

"Derek." Mark shakes his head. "Get it together, man."

_Take your goddamned wife home, Derek! What is this, a joke? Pull yourself together!_

And the biggest joke of all, his next words, too gentle not to hurt: "It's okay."

He waits until he gets his breath back. But she's alone in there and it seems wrong; for all the anger and the secrets and the lying and the things he'll maybe never get to say, it still seems wrong. His chest feels too tight to say the words, but Mark seems to know what he's asking. Silently, he inches toward the door.

"I'll stay," Mark offers.

It seems appropriate somehow. In a way Mark has always been the witness in their relationship: the witness to their first meeting in that long-ago anatomy lab. The witness, literally, to their union, his name scrawled decisively across the contract. And, of course, the witness to its destruction. Or mabye not witness; perpetrator? Now Mark stands his ground, fingers sturdy if white knuckled on the ledge overlooking the view. Derek watches the door swing heavily shut behind him and leans aagainst the wall, trying to catch his breath, equal parts stung and relieved to be free.

The expression in Mark's eyes stays with him, too recognizable.

It's too much, and he lets the wall do the hard work of holding him up. He hasn't had time to process the stocking, that scrap of red stitched heartbreak he hadn't seen in years. Now it's all tangled up, knotted in the thread of this new piece of information. He could call it game changing except he lost track of the game too long ago to remember how it used to be.

Addison, pregnant. His best friend's child. More secrets he doesn't know yet. He checks his watch. It will be hours. Ashamed of himself for needing it, he puts distance between himself and the brightly-lit cruelty of the OR. In the closed door of his office he views the scans again. And again, almost obsessively. He leans back in his chair, views the last three months instead, with the same clinical eye. What did he miss?

_It was one time! I know that's what everyone says, I know that's what always gets said, but-_

He sees better with his eyes closed. Footsteps pass his office, doctors on their way to heal and treat. Shame at his own impotence warm within him, all he can see is Addison in surgery. Addison alone.

Addison, pregnant.

* * *

><p><strong>Four and a Half Years Earlier<strong>

* * *

><p>"Addison!"<p>

She wakes like a tiger, arms and legs and angry and he moves in, trying to protect the incision.

"Addie, it's okay, just try to relax-"

Her voice is panicked, words flowing over each other. "I should have stopped working. I shouldn't have been standing up."

"No, Addison. No. Stop." He presses his fingers to her lips. "You did everything right. Dr. Shapiro said you were fine to work. This isn't your fault."

She's groggy and hysterical until they sedate her. Then she's uncharacteristically small in the expanse of white hospital bed, gown loose around her wound.

"Tell me," she whispers, eyes watery and blank.

"He has a fighting chance, Addie. He's small -" oh, what an understatement that is - "But he has a chance."

"I need to see him. Please."

"Addison..."

"_Please_, Derek."

He helps her sit in the wheelchair. He's seen what c-sections do to patients and she's no exception; typically stoic, she says nothing, but pain flashes visibly across her features.

"Addie, take it easy."

"Just bring me to him. Please."

At his isolette she stares, eyes wide with something between horror and recognition. Her fingers skate over the plexiglass and he hears - half wishing he couldn't - that the exhalation escaping her lips sounds like agony. She whispers his name.

Derek steps back, her pain somehow too big to intrude, huddles with the doctors by the doorway.

"She's going to be okay," they assure him.

"And the - and the baby?"

"It's early, Derek. The baby is right on the cusp of viability. We're going to do everything we can, but-" and there's an awkward glance at Addison's bowed head - "you should understand that chances are very slim."

He swallows hard. Understanding...

Her sobs are accusatory. "You could have saved him! Why couldn't they save him?"

"Addie." He smoothes tangled hair from her swollen eyes. "They needed to save you."

"No!" Her throaty yell pierces right through him. "They should have saved _him._ They could have done the Palmer - "

"It was too dangerous, Addie. It's unlikely he would have been able to stay in longer and you could have-"

"Every day counts! Every _hour_! You don't know about this. _I_ know!"

"It was too risky. Addison, you could have died, it was too much risk for only a slight chance of-"

"No. No! I would have told them to save him. I would have told them..." She's crying too hard to finish.

_You save the mother. You always save the mother. _

He tries to take her in his arms and she pulls away, crying out at the strain on her incision. Worried about injuring her further, he stops trying to hold her and just sits by the side of the bed, watching her fall apart. This is his punishment: for not being there, for authorizing the surgery, for wanting her to survive.

He doesn't see her cry again until he signs his son's death sentence a second time, six days later.

From the beginning, they warn him not to let her get too attached. The neonatal surgeon, the head of cardiothoracics, and finally the hospital chaplain.

But how do you tell your wife not to get attached to your child? As her stomach muscles slowly regain strength, she spends more time in the wheelchair, in the NICU, only returning to bed at Derek's insistence. He sleeps at her side. Their world narrows to the NICU and Addison's hospital room. Their world is tiny: two and a half pounds of fragile perfection. Addison stands at the isolette when she's strong enough, her eyes so haunted he can scarcely stand to look, and plasters a smile on her still-pale face. "He's stronger," she says.

The chaplain's a rabbi - it's New York, after all - and he combs his fingers gently through his beard as he talks gently to Derek about grief and acceptance. About letting go. Addison won't listen; before she has the strength to sit up, she stuffs her fingers in her ears when the chaplain comes into the room. When she's strong enough to walk, she just leaves.

"It's harder, for her," Derek offers by way of apology.

The chaplain gives him a sympathetic look. "It's hard for both of you."

He attempts, at the surgeons' suggestions, to reason with her. "He's not going to improve," he tries, having found her hunched over the isolette, baggy dark green scrubs like she's there to work. One arm shields her empty middle as if she could hold the baby inside her longer by sheer force of will.

"This is _m_y specialty, Derek," she hisses. "Not yours." She doesn't speak to him for the rest of the day.

One day. That's not so much, maybe, in the universe of time. In the grand scheme of a seven-year marriage.

For a child who lives less than a week, it's more. It's practically a lifetime.

* * *

><p>"Dr. Shepherd?" He jerks awake, hadn't realized he'd fallen asleep. His mouth is dry, his glasses skew-whiff on his face. An intern he doesn't recognize stands in front of him, breathless. For a minute his own breath catches as he tries to orient himself. "I'm sorry, I knocked but - they told me to come get you; the other Dr. Shepherd is out of surgery now."<p>

"She did well." Liu smiles at him as he hovers outside the recovery room. This is how they talk to families, as if it's the patient's accomplishment and not the surgeon's. Nothing like tragedy to strip him of his professional credentials. "She's breathing on her own, responding appropriately to stimuli, and they'll start to bring her down from the pain meds shortly."

Derek nods, waiting for more detail.

"Dr. Garroway set her arm." He nods at the head of ortho, in conversation with the black-haired resident he vaguely recognizes. "I'll let him tell you more about that, but in terms of healing, it's-" and Derek listens to words like _physical therapy _and _bone scan_ and the always-popular _we may have to re-evaluate down the road._

"And her - her other injuries?"

Dr. Liu's face is set. "We were able to do some preliminary work on the damage to her right side. Obviously, we're looking at a surgical course of action here, not a single event, so it's going to be a matter of preventing infection and scheduling the procedures in a way that's most beneficial to interim healing."

"Her face-"

The plastic surgeon interrupts: "When we got in we were able to see the damage was less than we'd previously thought. It did require some plating-"

Derek flinches at the word.

"-but I have high hopes for the reconstruction. Obviously there's some cosmetic choices she can take down the road..."

There's that phrase again: _down the road._ He can't think like that: he chooses denial instead. Denial of today's procedures and denial of the most recent procedure before that. Her white face floats in front of him and he pushes down this latest betrayal, concentrates on the way the beveled cloth felt in his hands when he read the letters. R, o, w, a. Thinks of his mothers thick sturdy fingers pausing, tucking in the needle, folding it up. This is it then, necessarily the beginning of a road - not the comfortable middle one would expect after eleven years. And not the forked end the three of them had wreaked in New York.

Something different entirely, and he's not at all sure he's ready.

Then Dr. Bailey is there, the warmth of her familiar face distracting him. "Let the man see his wife," she scolds.

"You can see go in now," they concede, and they smile at him as if it's what he wants.

_You don't even know what you want!_

With no articulable reason to hesitate, he opens the door and approaches her tentatively. The machines click and whirr along with her breathing; her eyes flutter open and closed, the medicine too strong to keep her awake more than a few seconds. It could be years ago except for the bandages obscuring half her face.

There's a chair by the side of her bed. He lowers his knees carefully, creakily, suddenly feeling ancient. Her uninjured hand is curled on the white sheet, a faint spot of orange on the palm. He has to look twice at the short, sharp nails that are so unlike her. Carefully, he slides his hand under hers and waits for her to notice he's there.

Her eyes flutter open again.

"Hey." He leans closer.

"Derek?"

"Yeah." He pushes his lips upward into the closest thing he can manage to a smile. "You're out of surgery. You, uh, it went well."

Now he's talking to her like a patient. The world is upside down.

She turns her visible eye to him. "Am I - did they-" her voice is hoarse.

"You're going to be fine."

She blinks, trying to take in her surroundings.

He opens his mouth, expecting some reassurance to come out - he's been by enough patient bedsides to know what you're supposed to say in these situations - and is utterly surprised by what comes out.

"I saw the stocking. It was still in the car."

She doesn't say anything. He's surprised by his own surprise - a deliberate man, a careful man, outbursts like these are not in his nature. But she looks less surprised than he feels and slowly the pieces start to slide together.

"Addison, I - I'm thinking you might remember more than you said you did."

She's silent; her eyes are glassy behind fluttering lids. He feels like a bully; troublingly, perhaps, it doesn't make him want to stop.

"That's why you wouldn't get out of the car."

No answer.

"Isn't it."

She's still staring at the ceiling, not looking at him. He can't stop the annoyance that rises within him; her silence feels petulant. Doesn't she know, he wishes he could hiss, that he knows her secret?

"Addison. Ignoring me isn't going to make this go away."

"That's _your_ strategy." She says it so quietly he can barely hear her, but with an audible fierceness despite her dry mouth.

He sighs heavily. "You could have been killed. It's just a - it's just a _thing_, Addison."

She says nothing.

"Is it worth dying for?"

She mumbles something that sounds like _what's it to you? _and raises an eyebrow. This is all wrong: wrong time, wrong place, wrong conversation. He can't stop himself, deals with the familiar feeling that their marriage is a conductor-less train on a rudderless track.

What he doesn't say is: Y_ou promised. _

* * *

><p><strong>Fourteen Years Earlier<strong>

* * *

><p>Naomi throws her head back with laughter, empty shot glasses clinking on the crowded table. "I know! I could hardly believe it. He was, like, a hundred and ten pounds. Maybe. With that swagger, like, who are you kidding? Am I supposed to be afraid of him?"<p>

Derek takes a mouthful of beer. It tastes sour in his mouth. The bar is too warm, loud with end-of-lab students and rowdy locals.

"Threatening my woman is a big mistake," Sam announces tipsily to the bar and Naomi rolls her eyes.

"Seriously, it was not a big deal. It was 125th Street!" she protests. "It was practically Columbia. What am I going to do?"

"What _did_ you do?" Addison breathes.

"I told him, why don't you just get on home and behave yourself? You're not getting anything from me!"

"Nai!" Addison sounds somewhere between outraged and impressed. Sam looks like he's trying not to laugh now.

"And he left! Ran right into the subway."

"Weren't you _scared_?" Addison squeaks.

"Oh come _on_, he was a teenager. Practically a kid. I'm not giving up my purse to some-"

"He could have had a gun." His own voice surprises himself, sharp. He's been holding onto his beer with two hands, willing the sweating bottle to focus him, and hasn't yet interjected.

Naomi glances at him. "He didn't."

"How do you know?"

There's an uneasy pause. Sam, ever the peacemaker, cuts in. "Before Supergirl here took all the attention, I was trying to get one of you to help me with Buckstein's lab assignment for tomorrow. Derek, did you say you had the notes?"

He nods briefly but Naomi frowns, dark eyes still fixed on him. "What's your problem, Derek?"

Addison looks uncomfortably from one of them to the other.

"Nothing," he says shortly. He stands up, throwing down the cocktail napkin he hadn't realized he'd been clenching. "You're stupid enough to get killed, that's your business."

"Derek, hey-" but he doesn't let Sam finish, pushing his chair back with enough force to knock it over and not stopping until the cold spring air bites the humiliating moisture at his cheeks. Dimly he's aware of someone calling his name.

He's bent over, hands on knees, outside the dorm when she catches up.

"Derek..."

"I don't want to talk about it."

"Okay." She waits for him to straighten up. "Can we go inside, at least? It's cold and I've been looking for you and - oh!"

She makes a startled sound as he grabs her, it's just that she's real and she's warm and he suddenly needs her. She kisses back obligingly, then peels herself off.

"Derek, I - I mean, I'm happy to - look, can you just tell me what that was about?"

He tugs her with him to his room, has his hands half under her sweater when she pushes them down. "Derek, no. Talk to me, please."

He sinks into the couch, guilt mingling with anger. "I'm sorry, Addison."

"You don't have to be sorry." The couch next to him lowers under her weight. "Derek, please just tell me ... what happened in there? Why did you blow up at Naomi?"

He turns on her with a fierceness that surprises him. "You can't ever do that. Not ever."

"I - don't understand."

"Hold onto a _thing_ like that. She could've been killed. He could've had a gun and it's just a _thing_, Addison, it's just a fucking thing she doesn't even care about and she never even wears it and-" he breaks off.

"Derek." Her voice is gentle. "You've lost me."

He looks into her soft pale eyes. He's waited almost two years to tell this story and now it's as inevitable as her cool, gentle hand on his cheek.

"You can tell me. What is it?"

"My father," he whispers. And then the words tumble out. He's thirteen again, slumped behind the jewelry case, his arms full of his squirming little sister, desperate to keep her quiet. As if it's happening again, he hears his father refuse to hand over his watch. Hears the explosion, the footsteps. Amy barreling out of his arms, finally screaming. _Daddy! _

Addison's quiet while he talks. Finally the torrent of words is over and he leans forward, somewhat embarrassed and suddenly very tired.

"That stupid watch. He died for it and - it didn't mean anything."

"I know." She's stroking his back and he catches her arms, holding her away from him.

"Promise me. Promise you'd never do what they did. It just - _things_ don't matter, okay?"

"Derek..." He's holding on tightly, maybe too much so, and he swallows hard, relaxes his grip.

"Derek, I promise."

She extracts her arms carefully and wraps them around him; he resists only for a moment and then his face is buried in endless softness. He lets her comb her fingers through his hair, murmur soft words he can barely hear, only the reiteration of her vow. "I won't, okay? I promise."

He falls asleep in her arms, wakes up with eyes and heart swollen. An emotional hangover. She doesn't mention it; she's brusquely affectionate, almost businesslike. Then she opens to him, her arms and her legs and afterward he sees something like gratitude in her eyes and feels the exquisite pain of needing her back. They fall asleep side by side afterwards, fingers intertwined, like equals.

* * *

><p>She's silent for a while, watching him watch her. Her voice, when she finally speaks, is small and fierce. "It's <em>not <em>just a thing."

"Addison."

"It's not."

Her voice cracks on the second word and he looks down, studying the pattern of fibers in the sheet. He should have waited to do this. When he looks up her visible eye is bright with unshed tears. It's uncomfortably reminiscent of her eyes in the bar on Christmas Eve, and he swallows, gentling his tone.

"Addie, I have a...I took a picture, when she - you know, when she gave it to us. I would have given you a copy, if you'd lost this."

"No."

"No, I wouldn't have?"

"No, I couldn't have asked for it. I couldn't -" she breaks off. Her voice is very soft. "I couldn't have said his name."

Meant to or not, it stings.

"You still haven't. Not since-"

"I know."

She coughs slightly, pain evident in her features, and guilt sears through him. She's coming off hours of surgery. Maybe a better man would comfort, not badger her. He practices, like another language. _It's okay. Everything's going to be fine. I'm here. _Then he remembers everything he knows and everything she didn't tell him.

_Now I'm sorry, Derek, I'm more sorry than you can possibly imagine, but at least I'm talking about it._

Finally, he reaches for her hand but she pulls it back. "I'm tired, Derek."

"Addison."

"Can you just - come back later?"

He stands up, looking down at her. It is how it often is: from far away, he feels sympathetic. He recognizes her pain as an outsider might. The brutally poignant image of a woman fighting off two violent men in the hope of keeping a memento of the child she lost. From close up, he feels the familiar frustration: her refusal to talk about what needs to be talked about, her insistence on talking about things that don't.

Two steps toward the door and he turns back. "I think about him too, you know."

She doesn't answer. Her eyes are closed, she's either asleep or pretending to be. He waits silently until he sees a tear slip out from beneath one lid.

Pretending.

_Figures_.

Outside the room his heart pounds with everything he can't let himself say. The problem - okay, one of the many problems - is that you can't be angry at someone who looks like that. There are words for how you can feel about a surgeon with a casted arm, an uncertain future, but it's not anger. They say words like _signs of improvement_ and _long road ahead_ while he's still choking on tomorrow. Unable to picture five minutes from now.

"Dr. Shepherd?"

He looks up.

"Do you have a moment?"

He follows the detectives into one of the counseling rooms, too tired for interrogation but too tired to resist; surely, this is their strategy. But they smile at him, eyes full of pity, and he remembers that they know now.

"We understand she's out of surgery. How is she doing?"

Medicine: this, he can handle. "The surgeries went well." He explains the procedures briefly, the familiar language of science helping to regulate his breathing.

The male detective shoots him a sympathetic look. "Look, Dr. Shepherd, we wanted to let you know that we've made some progress in the investigation."

He'd almost forgotten that they had their own job to do. "What did you-"

"We've tracked down the cab driver who picked up your wife on Christmas Eve."

He hadn't really thought about the logistics, had been so caught up in trying to balance the urgency of her medical crisis. How had she gotten from the trailer to the hospital parking lot? It seems at least some answers were available now.

He shakes his head. "I'm not sure I follow, can you-"

"She was picked up at the site of your - trailer - at around two a.m. according to the taxi dispatch records, and we understand she was dropped off in the parking lot where she was found."

He nods. Information: that's good. Something to focus on, to take apart. His hands move of their accord as he pieces it together, and he tries not to think about Addison slipping out of bed, quietly enough not to wake him. Calling a cab in whispers, maybe standing outside the trailer. It was so cold that night.

"But he didn't see-"

"He's down at the station meeting with some of our team. We'll talk to him too. It doesn't seem right now like he has that much useful information, but we'll get whatever we can."

"He must have seen something, he-" Derek stops, hearing the irony in his own words. Hasn't he been under that same hammer? He, who was supposed to see everything, saw nothing. The female detective breaks the silence:

"And we talked to Mark Sloan."

_Oh_. Derek stares at his lap, fist clenching automatically, defensively, under the table. He can only imagine what Mark would have said, his uncharacteristic moment of sympathy outside the gallery notwithstanding. Reluctantly he can admit they're both caged here, if for different reasons, no choice but to peck at each other's beaks under threat.

"He said you've never thrown a decent punch until yesterday, and he deserved it in spades."

Derek looks up, surprised.

"He said you're a good man. That you're his best friend. He seems very shaken up about the whole thing."

Derek swallows hard on surprise. "Excuse me," and he closes the door behind him.

He finds him where he would have gone anyway. Neither asks how the other knew where they were. They just stand side by side on the catwalk, both gazing straight ahead, not looking at each other.

Derek speaks first: "You didn't say anything to them. About what happened in New York."

Mark shakes his head.

"Why not?"

"If I thought - if I thought you had anything to do with this, I wouldn't have hesitated to tell them every gory detail."

Derek nods, swallowing hard.

"I know you didn't do this. I'm not sure what - but - come on, man. I know that."

"I wouldn't hurt her."

"There, we disagree." Mark's voice is tired, like the fight is already over. "You already have."

"What about what the two of you did to me?" Derek can't summon the energy to raise his voice either.

"We never meant to hurt you."

"Maybe none of us meant to hurt anyone."

"Maybe. She still got hurt though."

Derek looks out the large windows at the slowly fading sun. He sees her bruised face, the sounds she made when they cleaned her wounds, the agonizing way she looked at him when he couldn't help her. Remembers the night before Christmas: the way she turned away from him in the trailer, covering her face with her hands so he wouldn't see her cry. How she slumped against him as they walked to his car across the very same parking lot where she was attacked. The emptiness in her eyes as they drove over the bridge. And earlier: Her hand on the incubator, wedding rings flashing bright, asking him to do something. _Please, Derek. She has no one. Someone needs to fight for her. _Begging. _Please, Derek, please. I'm not ready. I'm not ready to say good-bye to him. _Stoic in the hospital, the taxi, the hall, finally collapsing in his arms in the privacy of their bedroom, but not crying. The pain, she said later, was too big for tears. Small and hunched on the stairs. Holding his face and pleading. She'd cried then. Messy wet sobs. Her unmistakeable voice on his answering service, over and over, that first week: _please, Derek, can you at least tell me where you are? _

It seems like so little, yet he says it anyway, with a nod of both agreement and finality. "Yeah. She still got hurt."

* * *

><p><em>Reviews are warmly welcomed and greatly appreciated. <em>


	9. Chapter 9

**Author's Note:**_ Thank you so much for the reviews - I'm so glad people are still reading and enjoying this story. Here's a monster chapter to move us forward; the next few will be shorter. I hope you'll keep reading and keep letting me know what you think!_

* * *

><p><strong>The Climbing Way<br>****Chapter Nine**

* * *

><p>Derek decides, as they stand less than a foot apart on the catwalk, that this fragile peace with Mark is not unlike monitoring a patient for the crucial twenty-four hours after surgery. Everything can change in a moment during that period: an upswing can become a downturn, a perfect incision can rupture.<p>

A heart can stop.

Now he's half-ashamed of how he behaved with Addison when she came out of surgery, half angry at the two of them for putting him in this position in the first place.

Still, he can't help taking advantage of this moment and without looking at his former best friend, he asks the question that's been gnawing at him since the police spoke with him:

"Can you please tell me what she said when you talked to her?"

"I didn't talk to her."

Derek looks up. "Excuse me?"

"I said I didn't-"

"Enough games, Mark. Have a little-"

"Derek." There's enough urgency in his tone to halt him. "I missed the call. I missed the goddamn call, okay?"

Oh. _Oh._ He can see it all too clearly now, the playboy and his Christmas Eve pursuits. No need to specify what he was doing instead of answering. Mark looks miserable and Derek waits for him to finish.

"I didn't pick up - I didn't know it was her, I didn't look - I heard the phone ringing but -" he breaks off. "She hadn't returned any of my calls, not a single once since she - I had no reason to think she would, and I was, you know, I was with-"

Almost pitying him, Derek interrupts. "Fine. Then what."

"She left me a voicemail."

His breath catches in his throat. "What did-"

Mark is staring out at the skyline and Derek watches his profile. For a moment it almost looks like his chin trembles. "She, um, she actually sounded pretty drunk." He gives a half laugh that sounds more like he's choking. "You know how she gets, she was kind of - wound up and just talking pretty fast. I didn't understand every word, but she said she had to get out of there and she said - what you said to her."

Derek's oddly grateful that he doesn't repeat the words.

"She was upset," he repeats. "She said her car wasn't there, and I - she didn't pick up when I called back. So I left a voicemail. I told her to get the hell out of there if she had to, to call a cab."

He forces himself to answer calmly. "Where did you tell her to go?"

"To a hotel, the one my travel service picked up. I told her to go to the bar in the Archfield, if she couldn't get a room for the rest of the night - I booked a room for when I got there."

"So why the hell was she in the hospital parking lot?"

"I don't know, Derek. Maybe she wanted to drive herself to the hotel or she needed something from her car or her office. I just don't know."

"Were you - was she going to leave with you?" He says the words carefully, testing them, not sure what - if anything - the answer will make him feel.

"She didn't stay with me last time." Mark's face is closed and white. Miserable. "I didn't kid myself that she would this time."

_Last time._

"Mark..." Derek shakes his head, not ready yet for more details.

"I just wanted to see her, Derek. She was - on the voicemail, she was crying. It was Christmas, and she was crying."

His stomach turns unpleasantly. There is no room in this story for him to be anything other than the villain. Any responsibility Addison could have borne was snatched away with her car. It's not the kind of thought he could voice out loud, but one that haunts him anyway.

"You're the one," Mark's voice is tight, painful sounding. "You're the one who told me we had to make exceptions for her. On Christmas."

He remembers those words. Remembers Addison making frantic preparations, begging Mark to go along with them. Remembers how she looked forward to the Shepherd Christmas every year, picking out gifts in advance.

_It's Christmas, Derek. Our season._

* * *

><p><strong>Eight Years Earlier<strong>

* * *

><p>"I'm not putting that on."<p>

"Mark!" Addison's hands are propped on her hips, her gaze disapproving. "You know the kids still believe. Come on."

"Then you dress as Santa."

"I'm not the one with a beer belly." She raises one eyebrow and like Pavlov's dog, Mark grabs at his flat-as-usual stomach.

"I do not. I'll have you know I was just-"

"Cut it out." Derek interrupts them before Mark can ply them both with a story about the gym or one of his conquests. "Addie, look, I'll wear it if Mark doesn't want to."

"No," she insists. "They'll notice if Uncle Derek is gone because you always hand out the oranges. It has to be Mark."

"How about if Commandant Christmas just backs off a little bit? Maybe just as a Christmas miracle?"

Addison scowls at Mark, then turns pleading eyes to Derek.

"Look, Mark," he tries. "Can't you just-"

Mark has a strange expression on his face. "Forget it." And he tosses the hat and beard at Addison, whose fingers close moments too late to catch them. They land in a pile at her feet.

Derek finds him in the kitchen. "Can you please just do this, Mark-"

"Why?"

"Because she loves Christmas, okay?"

"Yes, I know, Derek. Everyone within a twenty-block radius knows."

"Then why can't you do it?"

"Because I don't want to wear an itchy, stinking suit and break my neck on your mother's roof again this year!"

Derek sits down next to him. "Addison loves planning this cr - this stuff."

"I'm aware."

Derek takes a deep breath. "I don't ask you for a lot, Mark. Not much, anyway. I looked the other way with Kathleen, I cover for you with the nurses all the time, I think I'm a pretty good wing man. This means a lot to Addison and I need you to go along with it."

"Why?"

Derek sighs. "Christmas is - important to her. She didn't get to celebrate the way she wanted, growing up -" he thinks of the huge, cold estate, remembers walking from room to room trying to find Addison the one disastrous time they stopped in to see her parents on Christmas Eve. "Look, I know she can be a little overbearing about it-"

Mark snorts.

"But cut her some slack on Christmas. Okay? It's _Christmas_," he adds one last time.

"That word has officially lost all meaning."

"Don't let Addison hear you say that."

Mark scowls but nods, reluctantly, as Derek stands up. He claps his friend on the shoulder and heads back to the living room.

Addison is sitting on the couch, staring resolutely at the Santa hat and beard she's clutching in her lap. The Christmas tree lights are playing across her face, making her pale skin glow. Derek kisses the top of her head. "Mark's in."

She looks up, beaming. "Really?"

"Really." He sits down next to her. "You know, he's just - Mark."

"Thank you." She kisses him, a hand sliding into his hair.

"How about thanking me?" Mark takes the Santa hat and beard from Addison's lap and Derek feels the warm pressure of his wife's lips leave his.

"Thank you, Mark," she says pointedly and Derek rolls his eyes at Mark's look of mock-disappointment.

"Fine." Mark pops the hat on his head; it slips down to cover one eye. "But if I fall off the roof and break my neck _you're_ going to be the one giving me a sponge bath."

* * *

><p>Mark is watching him, an expression in his eyes he doesn't feel up to unpacking. With some effort Derek peels his hands from the railing. This time on the catwalk, these fragile moments, probably aren't real, he reminds himself. Mark betrayed him, slept with his wife. Got her pregnant while they were still married. He swallows hard on his feelings about the abortion, still somewhat ashamed of how he pressured Addison about the stocking when he came out of surgery. There will be time to discuss it.<p>

There has to be time.

"My flight leaves first thing in the morning," Mark says quietly, breaking the silence.

Something stirs in Derek at his words - it must be relief.

"I'd - like to see her before I go."

"I'll think about it." It's the best he can do, the gratitude in Mark's eyes probably embarrassing both of them. He excuses himself; halfway down the hall to check the board he remembers he promised Addison he'd call Archer. Deciding they've had enough broken vows, he returns to his office and flips reluctantly through his rolodex - one of the few things he hesitated to make electronic, he had it shipped from his office in New York - and dials his messaging service.

"Dr. Montgomery's line."

Naturally, he's not there. The last time he saw Archer - well. Better not to think about that. But he's never gotten along well with his brother-in-law - it's not his fault, the man has always been an unrepentant ass, and Addison has always had a blind spot a mile wide when it comes to him. The Montgomeries aren't big on things like showing up, so he hardly expects Archer to put down whatever manuscript or blonde he's working on and fly to Seattle.

Still, though.

He stands under the board, for a minute pretending this is just another day. His name is absent from the grid, his scheduled surgeries still covered. If there are new cases, he hasn't been asked to consult. He walks the halls like a ghost, as much in limbo as his recovering wife.

"Derek?" Richard, a look of sympathy in his eyes that Derek can't help but feel annoyed by.

"You should go home, get some sleep."

He shakes his head. He hasn't been back to the trailer since ... and he fell asleep earlier, awakened by the intern who told him Addison was out of surgery. Still, he's aware he's not a resident anymore, not twenty-six or even thirty-six, and his body reminds him that it needs more rest to function properly.

"I don't..." his voice trails off. _Not yet._

"I'll keep an eye on her."

"Maybe later," Derek says shortly. It's not quite six p.m. Forgotten bells and tinsel still hang from the walls, days after Christmas. This no-man's land between Christmas and New Year's, these discarded December days, have they always felt this bleak?

The head of the bed is partially lifted when he gets to Addison's room, propping her up. It gives her an aura of alertness.

"It's better for her to sit up as much as possible while her eye socket heals," the resident chirps unnecessarily. "Obviously, we need to balance that with the trauma to her ribs and to her right side."

"Thank you," he says shortly, hoping she'll take the hint.

"We'll need to get her walking in the next twenty-four hours, the earlier the better."

That's going to be an interesting ordeal. She's not going to want anyone to see her. Trying not to think about the complex logistics, he nods again, waiting for the resident to take the hint.

As subtly as he can, he takes stock of her injuries. There's a cold pack along the bandages on her face, hiding some of the swelling. The bruising along her neck is darker now, her casted arm held away from her body in a sling. He thinks he is almost getting used to seeing her like this, and the thought worries him.

"Hi," he says when the resident finally exits. He moves a few red strands away from Addison's face, thankful that she can't see the state of her hair. "How are you feeling?"

"Okay." Her voice is a croak and he pours water into a cup on the table by the side of her bed.

She raises her good hand, wincing slightly, to take the cup from him. He maintains his grip and they end up holding it together, Addison slowly sipping from the straw.

"Easy," he says automatically, mindful of the stitches in her mouth, and she nods slowly.

He takes the seat by her bed. "Are you ... ready to talk?"

She looks confused.

"You asked me to come back later, before - " now he's confused. "When we talked - about the stocking."

"The stocking?" Her face pales.

"Addison, you don't-" he feels cold, all of a sudden. "We talked - don't you - do you remember talking when you came out of surgery?"

"No," she whispers. "I don't - before surgery, I think, you were - here. I don't know."

"It's okay." He sits down heavily. "The meds..."

He studies her visible eye; it's tracking properly. The first conversation they've had about Rowan in years ... and she doesn't even remember it. Almost casually, he wonders whether that makes it harder or easier.

"What did we talk about?" she asks slowly.

His shameful summary consists of two painful words: "The stocking."

He sees her lips purse for a moment, as if she's about to say his name. She goes silent before an _r_ sound can escape but her lips stay pressed together. Almost like a kiss.

"I want it back," she murmurs finally. "His stocking. Do you - do you have it?"

"The police are holding onto it for now. They said we'll - I think we can get it back when this is over."

_When this is over._ He swallows hard on the words. _You have a long road ahead of you._

"Addison," he says carefully. "Do you, uh, remember what you're doing here?"

She blinks. "I got hurt," she says slowly.

"Yes. But-"

"Everyone keeps asking me if I remember anything." She's looking down at her good hand, folding and refolding the same corner of the blanket that covers her lap.

"Everyone?"

"People. Police."

Oh. He hadn't realized she remembered that. "Do you-"

"They won't tell me what happened."

"I don't think they know," he says finally, choosing his words carefully. "Addison, you were - when they found you, you were unconscious in the hospital parking lot."

He waits for shock, tears, anything, but she hardly reacts.

"Someone told me that already."

"Who?"

"I don't remember. I woke up in the hospital."

"Do you remember anything before that?" he prompts gently, a little bit worried about the answer.

_It's Christmas, Derek. We love Christmas - at least we used to._

"I can remember being in the OR. I think. And - lights."

"Lights?"

"Christmas lights." Her good shoulder lifts in a half shrug.

He thinks of the lights at Joe's, how they played off her white sweater. Of her hands gripping her drink, her long hair spread out on the surface of the table when she dropped her head into her hands. Christmas carols on the radio, the familiar bar smell in the air. Her weight against him as they walked across the parking lot.

"I'm sorry."

"It's fine." He gives her a brief smile, reaching automatically for her good hand.

Her fingers run over his, frowning, as she did what seems like forever ago. "Derek, did someone check out your hand?"

He closes his eyes briefly. "My hand is fine, Addison. Don't worry about it. Listen." He squeezes her fingers gently. "You still may remember more. It can take time, and-"

"There's a lot we don't know about the brain," she finishes for him.

"Exactly."

She starts to smile back at him, wincing when it stretches her stitches.

Before he can remind her to be careful again, two residents come in for post-op. "We're just going to take a look at the incisions."

He feels the tension in Addison's hand, still in his.

"Is it-"

"There shouldn't be any discomfort in this part of the process."

His pager goes off. Richard. He glances at Addison. "Do you mind if I-"

She shakes her head. "It's fine."

"Okay." He touches her uninjured cheek. "I'll see you in a little while."

He sees the Chief outside his office. "You paged?"

Richard surveys him for a moment. "Can you come and sit down for a minute?"

He leads him to his office.

"What is this?" he smiles nervously, seeing the unfamiliar faces.

"Derek, we just want to talk to you." Richard introduces the attendants, Derek's stomach sinking as he makes the rounds. Psych. A grief counselor. The head of social work.

"What's going on?" Derek asks again.

"We want to talk to you," Richard offers vaguely.

"We just want to make sure both of you understand the process here, and some of the complications of this situation." The social worker.

He lets their words wash over him. _Trauma_ and _assault_ and _post-traumatic stress _and the word he is beginning to loathe most of all, _time._

"It's going to take time. There is a long road of recovery ahead for her. She came out of this surgery well and that's the next step. What thought have you given to long-term care?"

"Excuse me?"

Richard clears his throat. "You haven't cut in three days, Derek. Now, I've kept you off the board because I assumed it was what you wanted, but I'd like to get my head of neurosurgery back in the game, even if it's part time."

He nods.

"Are there family members, anyone else you can call, who might want to - spend time with her, while you're working?"

He gives them the short answer. "I called her brother."

"Is he coming out here?"

_Not bloody likely._

"I'm not sure yet."

He sees Richard's expression.

"I'm not sure she's going to want someone around - so much - anyway," he explains lamely.

Richard exchanges glances with the social worker. "Derek, that's another issue we'd like to discuss. With the immediate medical crisis at least somewhat behind her, there are going to be other - issues that may come up. In addition to the physical recovery, which will be significant, there are other aspects of her ordeal that she - that both of you - are going to need to address."

He blinks. "Sorry?"

"She underwent a significant trauma. There are victims' services groups, here in the hospital-" oh, Addison would love that, he thinks bitterly - "and we want to encourage both of you to take advantage of counseling services."

_Bring in anyone you want, Derek - I have nothing to say. _

"I'm not sure she'd be interested."

They exchange another look. "We understand, but in cases like this there are often concerns about ensuring that the vic - that the patient and her family deal with what's happened to her. Obviously she's had to try to recover from the immediate physical danger, but as she recovers and gets stronger the emotional component may become a larger issue."

Addison, in denial?

"Thank you. I'll keep that in mind." He thinks about the only kind of counseling she's ever agreed to.

_Marriage is - it's about compromise. You know, it's a give and take. _

He leaves with the only excuse he knows will work: "I need to check on her."

He bumps into Meredith on the way, her arms full of foldered scans.

"Was this hospital always so small?"

He smiles briefly. "Pretty much." He nods at the scans in her hand. "Are those for me?"

"Post-op scans." She hands them to him and he begins to flip through.

"Mark Sloan's been studying them," she observes.

He waits for the expected feeling of anger but the feeling washing up against him feels altogether milder.

"He told me he's leaving in the morning," Meredith adds.

Derek nods. "He's going back to New York."

"Sometimes I forget you're from New York." She stops. "Sorry. I don't even know what that means, or if it's a good thing, or-"

"Sometimes I forget too."

"You were best friends," she muses.

"All three of us," he acknowledges.

"Why do you think they - no, this isn't the time, I'm sorry," she cuts herself off before she can finish.

"No, it's okay. Why did they have the affair, you mean?"

Meredith nods.

"Didn't she tell you? She said she did." He closes the folder on an image of neatly repaired bone. "Sometimes people do desperate things," he parrots.

"... to get someone's attention," she finishes. "Is that why, do you think?"

"For attention?" He shrugs. "Honestly, I don't know."

"Did you pay attention to her?" Her eyes are soft, and he tries not to look too closely at them, for fear of getting lost. For fear of remembering when he was allowed to look at her as much as he wanted.

He looks, though. He looks, in spite of himself, and sees that nothing is the same. Her eyes are different now. Because even if she doesn't say anything, if she's too tactful and too diplomatic and too professional, she _knows_ now, and that changes everything.

The baby they lost. Even without knowing the things they don't talk about, she knows too much.

The Broken Marriage Game - they'll win. They always win.

"I was just - a little distant," he says finally. "Not that that excuses anything."

"What about him?" Meredith asks.

"What _about_ him?"

"Why do you think he...?" she trails off.

He shrugs. "Other than that he's a womanizer without a moral compass to speak of?" When she doesn't say anything, he goes on: "Mark was - he was our best friend. He was, you know, he was always around."

"When you weren't, you mean?"

He shakes his head. "That's not what I said."

But he decides not to address whether it was what he meant.

* * *

><p><strong>One Year Earlier<strong>

* * *

><p>He pauses with a hand on the door. Everything is the same, and he knows what to expect when he walks in. He pushes the front door open and lets the central heat warm him; outside, it's ten below. The foyer is quiet; the only sound in the house wafting from the den.<p>

He sees the back of their heads on the couch as he walks toward the source of the noise, a movie flickering on the large TV screen. Neither of them turns around as he approaches.

"Hi," he says shortly, divesting himself of his briefcase.

Addison swivels first. "Hey."

He nods at the television. _It's a Wonderful Life. _"Looks like you got started without me."

"Pre-Christmas, Derek." Her voice has a very faint hint of accusation, a tone that normally bothers him, but he lets it go. "We waited for a few hours."

She turns back to the movie.

"My patient's frontal lobe thanks you for waiting so patiently." He leans forward, she turns her face up obligingly and he brushes her cheek with a kiss.

He nods at Mark. "Keeping my seat warm?"

"Trying."

"I'm exhausted." He tugs carefully at his leather gloves, loosening one finger at a time until he can slide them off, and unbuttons his camel-colored cashmere coat. He surrendered control of his wardrobe to his wife years ago; he still has the old barn jacket he loved to wear fishing, but he's under strict orders not to take it out of the hall closet unless they're driving directly to the country house. And it's been a while. "I've been at the hospital for-"

"-two days," Addison finishes, her tone neutral. "I know."

"Right. I'm going to bed."

"Derek." She half-rises, unfolding her long legs. "Wait, I'll come with you."

"Thanks a lot." Mark makes a mock-hurt grimace. "I guess I'll just sit here by myself and wait for someone to help George Bailey tonight."

"You already know how it ends."

"Maybe it will be different this year." The light from the television illuminates an unidentifiable expression.

"I doubt it," Addison smiles.

Derek finishes hanging his coat and runs tired fingers through his mussed hair. "I'm going upstairs. Mark - crash here if you like. It's below freezing out there."

Mark glances up at him and Derek nods tiredly, stripped down to the brushed wool suit he wore to work that day. He sees Addison frown at the sight of his tie, one of the spares he keeps in the office. _What? _he mouths at her and she backs down, shaking her head.

"Mark, you should stay," she echoes. She rests a hand on the back of the couch. "The first-floor guest room is made up. There are extra blankets in the closet in there, and towels in the bathroom."

"Thanks, Martha Stewart," Mark says, not looking away from the television. "Might take you up on that, but I'm not moving from this spot until the movie's over. A date's a date, right?"

"We could start over, now that Derek's here..." she trails off.

"A four-hour movie?"

"It's not even close to that long!"

"You can stay and watch, Addison," Derek interrupts, his tone patient. "I'm going to go right to sleep anyway. I need to be up at five."

Mark is already too engrossed in the movie again, apparently, to make any innuendo-laden comment from that - unlike him.

Addison just hovers in place, half on and half off the couch, looking from one of them to the other.

Derek walks further into the room - overtired at this point, his hands need to _do _something, and he reaches for the empty wineglasses on the coffee table, balanced between a stack of open catalogues.

Mark glances over. "Derek, you're kind of in the way."

He steps back, away from the television. "Sorry." The glasses can stay there for one night.

Mark settles back against the couch again. "Thanks, man."

Addison stands. "I'm going to bed. Mark, I'll see you in the morning?" There's a question mark in her tone, but Mark doesn't answer.

Derek mounts the stairs and she pads behind him. Her footfalls and her manner are tentative; they'd both been in moods the last time they spoke, tense and short with each other. If he knows her she'll be extra sensitive about it now, while he's willing to offer some magnanimity with his genuine exhaustion.

"I'm sorry I couldn't make it earlier," he offers along with a brief smile as he sits down on the chaise to remove his shoes.

"It's all right. Mark was disappointed," she adds quietly, pulling back the duvet to reveal cream-colored flannel sheets.

They talk past each other in neat sentences. Where once there would have been accusations and tears, raised voices and lowered eyes, now they can speak coolly without responding directly to the other. Mostly he thinks it's an improvement: they've been married ten years. A decade. They can communicate without all that unnecessary passion.

She's wearing his old Bowdoin sweatshirt and loose flannel pajama pants. He's had that sweatshirt since sophomore year and it's ratty as anything, but fleecy soft. And heavy. He's relieved that she's not nagging him, and with the loosening of the guilt in his stomach comes the expected feeling of generosity. "Cold?" he asks her conversationally as they slide under the covers. The room plunges into darkness as they tug the chains on their matching antique bedside lamps with practiced symmetry.

"Not really," she says, but the toes that brush against his are like ice.

After a few long minutes of staring at the paisley patterns behind his lids, he rolls over onto his side, trying to get comfortable without disturbing her. She's breathing deeply, but he can't tell if she's asleep. Tentatively, he reaches out, grazing the fleecy material of the sweatshirt. The moment he makes contact he realizes he's not sure why he's done it.

She stirs, whispering: "Derek?"

"Yeah." His hands are back on his side of the bed.

"What are you doing?"

"Did I wake you?"

"No."

There they are again, those sentences. Talking past each other.

"What's wrong?" Her voice is hoarse in the dark. The double-thick shades mean that he can't see much of anything. He can't make her out at all.

"Nothing, Addison. Go back to sleep."

"Night," she mumbles, and he hears her roll over, further away from him.

"Good night." It takes him longer to fall asleep than it should for someone awake for the last twenty-six hours. He lies silently, listening to the faint sound of the television wafting up from downstairs. Mark is still watching _It's a Wonderful Life _on their couch.

He wonders if anyone has helped George Bailey yet.

* * *

><p>Derek shakes off the memory with a corresponding shake of his head. Meredith is watching him.<p>

"I have no idea what Mark was thinking," he says finally.

If she suspects it's a lie she's too diplomatic to say so.

The question stays with him.

He finds Mark on the catwalk, their self-identified green zone.

"Meredith asked-" he looks out at the Sound. "She wanted to know why you did what you did."

"Other than a penchant for self-destruction, you mean?"

Derek doesn't respond.

"I wasn't trying to hurt you. I guess in some perverse way I thought I was doing you a favor."

He can't speak. "How-'"

"You didn't talk, you didn't - it's like you both just - seemed to stop noticing each other. You were busy, Derek - I mean, you were both busy, but _you_ seemed fine, where Addison - she was just wilting. She _needed _someone."

"She could have told me."

"I don't think she knew how to," Mark says cautiously, clearly trying not to break the fragile peace they've established in this circumscribed spot. "I think she did the best she could. I don't think she's so good at asking for what she needs. You just - you always gave it to her, without her having to ask. And when you stopped, I don't think she knew how to try to get it back."

He's silent, turning this over in his mind.

"After...what happened," Mark says quietly - because no one speaks directly of their child - "I think she just kind of shut down."

This he knows. He found her more than a few times in the half-assembled nursery, looking over boxes and bags of things they'd never use. They should be given away, he said. But she didn't want to. She didn't want to do much of anything: See a grief counselor. Establish a memorial fund. Talk to his sister. Eat.

And nothing he said helped. _"We'll try again when we're ready."_

_But she'd turned on him. "Try again? Try again? He's not some - golden retriever that was hit by a car and you can distract me with a new puppy!"_

She looked as surprised as he did to hear her words. He stood in the doorway of the small, sunny room, light and shadows playing on her pale, strained face.

She apologized, then. Put her arms around his neck, whispered that she hadn't meant it. But she had, of course. The problem was that they meant everything they did. When he pushed open his bedroom door to see her long white legs wrapped around his best friend - the door wasn't even fully closed, and he knew she meant that too.

"Dr. Shepherd?" A nurse, looking apologetic. "Dr. Montgomery-Shepherd is asking for you."

Addison doesn't say anything when he walks in, but her eyes meet his immediately. She starts to reach toward him and he sees that her right arm is strapped to a soft cuff.

"Why is she restrained?"

"Her strength has increased, she's been observed as quite mobile during sleep and we can't risk any contact with the wounds on her side while she's in this position. It's standard procedure."

_Standard procedure. _How many times has he used that expression, without a second thought? But this is different. He frowns.

At his expression the doctor lifts Addison's wrist, encased in a soft cuff, and swings it gently up and toward her other side, demonstrating. "There's as much movement as we can chance. This way she has some flexibility, but can't reach the injury site."

The doctor is gentle, but something about the way she just manipulates Addison's arm like a rag doll bothers him.

"She doesn't need it when I'm here. I'll watch her."

"But -"

"I'll refasten it when I leave." He makes sure his tone brooks no argument and sits in the chair by her side, carefully unstrapping the velcro cuff. He lifts her arm free and automatically rubs at the slight markings on her skin.

She doesn't say anything until the doctor leaves.

"Thank you," she whispers.

He blinks, remembering Mark's words.

_I don't think she was so good at asking for what she needed. You just - gave it to her, without her having to ask._

"Derek." Her fingers curl around the side of the bed. He looks past the bandages covering one side of her face at her good eye, impossibly blue in this light. The moment before she speaks leaves him anxious - wondering what's coming next - but she only asks: "How - how are the quints doing?"

He's surprised; he takes a moment to check his blackberry, trying to decide what to say, not sure if she's forgotten that one of them didn't make it - and not willing to be the one to remind her. Somehow it seems both wildly inappropriate and perfectly on-point to discuss patients.

She answers his question before he can ask it, lowering her eyes. "The four of them, I mean."

He pauses for another moment before answering, struck by how natural it seems to refer to a depleted whole by the name it used to carry. Four babies, their fifth sister gone: _the quints._ He and Addison, without Rowan: _a family._ He and Mark, without trust: _best friends. _And he and Addison now, fingers inches away from each other's - still _a couple_.

Of sorts.

"I'll find out," he assures her.

"Who's taking over my-"

"They brought in someone from St. Josephine's."

She looks away again and he assumes she's thinking of her new contract, the shiny new neonatal wing, her service. She's never liked giving up control.

"Addison, when you're back on your feet-"

"When will that be?" her voice, little and hoarse and angry, hits him in a way he can't identify.

"Addie..."

"Forget it." She waves her good hand.

He's distinctly aware that he should be carrying the conversation, but what do you talk about at a time like this? Hanging over them is the shadow of her secret, the one he's taken on as his own. How long had she carried it within her, keeping it from him? Now he's the one to hide it.

"Derek, I-"

His pager interrupts her.

"I'll be back soon to check on you." He touches her cheek. "Get some rest, okay?"

He reaches for the cuff, lifts her wrist in his hand. She says something, her voice faint, and he has to lean closer to hear it.

"Please don't."

"Addison." He tries to catch her eye. "You need to keep your injury clean. They don't want to risk infection, and you might accidentally touch it. It's not for long-"

"I won't touch it."

"Addison."

"Derek, please." Her eyes are very bright. How many times has he refused her when she's asked like this?

_Please, Derek, please. I'm not ready to say to good-bye to him._

_Derek, please, you have to give me a chance to explain!_

"All right." He draws her arm lightly down, tucks it against her hip. "Keep your arm on this side, okay?"

He answers the page at a trot; it's his answering service, putting through one of the calls he's been dreading.

"Archer." He sighs, shifting the phone. "I need to tell you something."

"What? You'll have to speak louder, Derek. There's some kind of beach band here, hula girls - you know how these conferences go."

"Yeah." He shakes his head. "Archer, listen, I need to talk to you about Addison. Something's happened and - Addison's been hurt."

"What?"

"I said Addison's been hurt!" Two residents walking by turn at his loud voice and he walks several strides away for more privacy.

"What do you mean, hurt?"

He relays a short version of the details.

"Christ, Derek, how the hell did this happen?"

"She asked me to call you," he says instead of answering. "If you want to fly out here-"

"Seattle." Derek can almost hear him shaking his head. "Goddamned backwater. Is she getting the treatment she needs? Do you have actual surgeons out there?"

Derek massages a crick in his neck. "Her treatment is excellent."

"We can fly her back-"

"Archer, why don't you come out here and see her for yourself before you make any grand plans."

It sounds like a dare and maybe it is one, so it's with some sense of defeat that he hears Archer concede and promise he'll be in touch once his agent has made plans.

_Great. _Because having Addison's family around always goes so well.

He passes the board again on his way to his office, reviews the conspicuous absence of his name. Richard is right; he's going to need to cut again. Maybe if Archer comes through, it won't matter if he's slightly less available. He can pick up a few surgeries, start working again and if Addison needs company Archer can pick up the slack for once. And there's Adele, who's been clamoring to see her.

"Derek-"

Speaking of clamoring to see her. Mark catches up with him in the hall. "Her post-op scans look good."

"Good. She's probably sleeping now," he adds.

Mark's brow furrows.

"I know you wanted to see her, before you - "

"Right." A strange expression crosses his face. "Well, you shouldn't wake her up. She needs to rest."

Mark's bowed head, for some reason, takes him back to the bar on Christmas Eve.

_It wasn't a fling. It wasn't revenge. I fell in love with her._

Without knowing why he feels the need to unburden, he speaks: "I didn't say it to hurt her, Mark." There's no need for further clarification.

"Maybe not." Mark flexes his fingers. "But that's what it did."

They're both silent; Derek's never sure exactly what's Mark thinking, but perhaps it has something to do with his not being there either, when she actually needed them.

"Dr. Shepherd!" An intern whose name he doesn't recall, out of breath. At that moment, his pager goes off. "Please - can you come -"

There's a commotion in Addison's room as he jogs up.

"What the hell is going on?"

"There was a code - she must have pulled out her IV-"

He pushes past the doctors and nurses surrounding her. She's flailing with her good arm, clearly in a panic, her breath coming out in choked gasps. Her visible eye is wild and he's not certain she's fully awake. A nurse is pressing an oxygen mask close to her face with little success. There are two - no, three people trying to hold her down as she thrashes. He watches as her breath catches in her throat and she starts to cough.

"Okay, move back."

"We need to-"

"Move _back_." He elbows past the nurse with the oxygen mask, gets in her face like he couldn't the first time they asked him to.

"Addison! Look at me." He positions himself right in her line of vision and cups her face between his hands. "Look at me, Addison. You're in the hospital. You're okay. Calm down. _Calm down_."

She's panting, still straining against all the hands, but he senses her catch her breath slightly, eyes fixed on his.

"Listen to me. We have to replace your IV. You need to calm down. You're safe, and when you calm down everyone is going to let go of you. Addison. Listen to me. Do you understand me?"

She nods jerkily. Sweat is beaded on her brow.

"Okay, good. Breathe with me. Come on, you can do it - no, look at me. Just you and me, I want you to focus. Slow down. In and out, come on."

Gradually, her breaths calm.

"That's right. Good. Slow your breathing down. Slow." He draws out the word. "Slow breaths."

She's matching him inhale for exhale now, her uninjured limbs relaxing against the mattress. He signals to the nurse holding the IV.

He keeps his hands on her face as the IV is reinserted. Her limbs are slack now, and when the intern carefully replaces the cuff on her arm she doesn't protest. Everyone else removes their hands from her. Finally, everyone drifts out of the room except for a single nurse.

Derek sits down in the chair by her side, lets her free hand find his, restrained only lightly by the cuff. It's a while before she speaks again, her breathing still slightly labored, perspiration on her upper lip.

"I don't want this," she whispers finally.

"I know you don't. I'm sorry."

"I didn't mean to - I won't pull it out again."

"Addison." His chest feels strangely tight. "I'm sorry, but the risk of infection is too high. You need to wear it a little while longer. I shouldn't have taken it off before."

There are tears in her eyes and he knows she can't reach her face to wipe them off. He hears Mark's voice, again:

_I didn't mean to hurt you._

Now he's the one whose help has turned to hurt. He's struck again by the inability to separate the threads of the three of them, the quilt of betrayal and loss. He reaches up, intending to thumb away the moisture from her cheek, but she turns her head away.

Not before he sees the betrayal in her eyes.

He stands. "I'll be back later to check on you."

If she hears him, she makes no indication.

He considers kissing her cheek, settles for patting her shoulder instead. She continues to ignore him.

Dr. Bailey is waiting for him outside her room.

"Look at you coming through, Shepherd."

He shakes his head. "No, she's - she doesn't like being restrained."

"Well, why would she?"

"But she - what if she needs something-"

"There's a nurse in there at all times until it comes off. A _female_ nurse," Bailey specifies. "If her nose itches, there's someone there to scratch it. She's in good hands."

"I took the cuff off," he murmurs. He's too embarrassed to meet the other doctor's eyes, but looking down just means looking right into the face of the much shorter woman. He settles for looking over her left shoulder. "It's my fault. I didn't think she should have been restrained, and I - "

"You were looking out for her."

"No." Didn't she hear him? "I said it was my fault. I took the cuff off, and I left her there - she wouldn't have been able to pull out the IV if I hadn't done that."

"I heard you." Bailey gives him that look again, the one that makes him feel uncomfortably _seen._ "And like I said, you were looking out for her. Just like you're supposed to."

She looks him up and down then, her expression, despite her arguably complimentary words earlier, decidedly unimpressed. "Shepherd, when was the last time you slept?"

"Richard told me to go home, but-" he breaks off.

Bailey's look is almost sympathetic now. "The man wants you to walk before you can crawl."

"Excuse me?"

She shakes her head. "You're no good to her without sleep. Take an on-call room bed. Or isn't there a couch in your fancy office?"

"I'm not-"

"I heard a rumor you might actually start doing your job tomorrow." She narrows her eyes. "Think you can do that on no sleep?"

"News travels fast in this hospital."

"Always has," she mutters, snapping her binder shut with finality. "Always has."

There's no way he can face the trailer tonight; his hands are shaking faintly from a recognizable combination of stress and lack of sleep. He checks on Addison, who's still asleep, and by the time he gets back to his office someone has had a rolling cot set up next to the couch. He's too tired by then to question it; he sinks onto the bed, the empty space beside him looking too much like her not to sting.

He wakes early, alone, swallows coffee with the weak dawn light. Another day. He checks on Addison, twice: she's sleeping, sedated, the soft cuff on her wrist screaming his treachery. He thinks of Mark, following him out of the gallery, promising to stay and watch the surgery so Derek won't have to. Of Addison, mercifully having forgotten their confrontation in the recovery room. Checking his watch, he notes that Mark should be leaving for the airport in less than an hour. Weighing his sense of generosity, he considers letting him into Addison's room.

"She's holding steady."

He looks up. Richard. Derek nods.

"She's a fighter," Richard adds.

_We didn't even bother to fight anymore._

"Yeah." He looks down. "She is." He thinks of her fighting for the stocking, fighting to survive, blocks - as he has successfully so far - the image of her in pain, the hours she spent in the icy parking lot. Fighting for him.

"The plan is to get her up and walking later this morning."

Derek nods.

"If you can - "

"I'll be there."

_You're never there!_

Richard smiles sadly and Derek allows himself, just for a moment, to feel a twinge of what seems almost like hope. Mark will be gone in a few hours and Addison will be on her feet. For the first time since he got the call, he's beginning to feel somewhat less impotent. Mark is leaving, and despite the fragile peace they'd begun to establish he knows this is the right course - he'll take the pain of their past with him, letting them move forward. Addison is improving slowly, if steadily - and he allows himself a moment of something almost like pride that he was able to get through to her earlier. He sees her standing in front of him, in royal blue scrubs, fresh off signing her multi-million dollar contract.

_Derek, we're okay, right?_

_Yeah. We're okay._

He indulges, for a moment, in the thought that he might have been right.

Just then something white flashes before him across the hall, catches his eye. Three heads bent together over a chart. Three white coats.

He pauses. _It can't be._

His gaze focuses on one of the white coats, complete with Seattle Grace nametag, right below a very familiar jawline. He keeps looking up until he sees a toothy grin. And a neatly sutured cheekbone.

_No._

He turns on the Chief, still standing next to him.

"You gave Mark Sloan surgical privileges?

* * *

><p><em>Reviews are warmly welcomed and greatly appreciated.<em>


	10. Chapter 10

**Author's Note: **_Thank you so very much for the reviews - they are greatly appreciated and encourage me to keep this story going even when I think I'm the only one still reading it - and even with the occasionally long delays between chapters. This long one is the result of my deciding to keep the chapters shorter to speed things along - and that's still a goal, but it will have to start next time. Please do let me know your thoughts - if you've been reading but haven't reviewed, I hope you'll let me know what you think of the story so far! Enjoy._

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><p><strong>The Climbing Way<br>****Chapter Ten**

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><p>"<em>You gave Mark Sloan surgical privileges?"<em>

Richard regards him with infuriating calm. "Derek, whatever your history is with the man, he's a world-class surgeon. Extending him privileges is a coup for this hospital. Not to mention a professional courtesy. It's not personal."

"It's personal to me."

"He has no access to Addison or her records. He understands this. I've requested a conflict screen and all her files will be clearly marked. If he causes a problem - one problem - he'll be out of here."

"_If._" Derek shakes his head. "Right." He raises his voice. "All he does is cause problems!"

"Derek, he's slated to operate tomorrow on a little girl who lost half her face to cancer. He studied under the pioneering surgeon in New York; no one else on staff had that privilege. Do you want to be the one to tell this child - or her parents - that the surgery is cancelled because of his ... sexual exploits?"

He grips the edge of the file he's holding. Richard's actually waiting for an answer. "No. Of course not."

"Good." His voice softens somewhat. "Then trust me to run my hospital, Derek, and I'll trust you to handle your personal life."

His personal life. What's left of it is dozing when he walks into her room, a nurse discreetly checking her IV. Derek glances at her chart as Addison wakes, slowly. He sees the moment her confinement registers with her, as she starts to stretch awake in that familiar way. She stops abruptly, flinches.

"Easy," he warns quietly.

She doesn't respond; she doesn't have to. He knows that for a moment she forgot, and he's silent too while she puts herself back together.

"How are you feeling?" he asks finally.

"Thirsty."

He pours her a cup of water, holds the straw to her lips.

"I heard you're going to walk today."

She gives a half shouldered shrug.

"I'll walk with you. Richard's pushing me to get back to work" - it's sort of true, anyway - "but I'll be back before they get you up. Okay?"

"Yeah, okay." Her voice is still slightly hoarse. "Was Richard - in here?"

"He stopped in. Maybe you were sleeping."

"I think I remember." She pauses. "Who else-"

"Miranda Bailey," he says, "if that counts. I - didn't think you'd want too many visitors."

"I don't."

"Well, I'll get the word out." He touches her hand. "You should rest. Save your strength for walking." He notices the flowers lining the opposite wall, not sure how he missed them before. At least one of them is pungent, and he wrinkles his nose at the overly sweet smell. "What are those?"

She makes a face - or tries to. "Word got out, I guess."

He walks over to the display. There's a massive urn of lilies, a brightly colored, rather tropical looking assortment and some kind of plant he doesn't recognize. He checks the card - Sam and Naomi Bennett. They _would_ send a plant; they're all about holistic methods and California sunshine now. If she were feeling better they'd joke about it. Savvy and Weiss sent something relatively small and tasteful, but it just reminds him of their visit out here, of Weiss slumped and miserable in the lobby, Savvy blue-draped and shivering in the OR. His family must have done its job, the phone tree activated, and he's been free to ignore the messages piling in on his cell phone, the emails loading up his blackberry. Nancy, the organizer, she would have made the calls. Kathleen, the shrink, would have helped her figure out what to say. Did half their friends even know they were out here?

"A lot of people are thinking of you," he says finally, for lack of something better to say.

"Send it all to Pediatrics, will you?"

"You don't want to keep any of them?"

"No." She makes that half-face again. "It looks like a funeral home in here."

The image is chilling, and it makes him remember things he'd rather not. "Do you want to keep the cards, or-"

"Just get them out of here."

She's staring at the ceiling, her nose twitching slightly as if she's itching not to smell the flowers anymore.

He bends to kiss her cheek before he leaves. "I'll be back later to help you walk."

"Did you reach my brother?" she calls after him, his hand already at the door.

He turns back, nods.

"Is he-"

"He said he would."

Addison smiles.

"I don't know if you should get your hopes up," he starts before he can stop himself, then regrets it when a shadow crosses her face.

"He's busy, Derek." Addison sighs. "I wish you two could get along."

"He's always hated me." And so the conversation goes, as though things are normal.

"He's protective," she counters.

"It's been fifteen years, Addison. I think your virtue is -" he stops before saying _nonexistent_, and goes with "safe" instead.

He's glad in the end, because the look on her face as he leaves is something like a smile and he finds one of his own touching his lips in response.

He closes the door quietly behind him and walks straight into Mark in the hallway.

So much for the smile.

"Stalking me?"

"I want to see her."

"It was a clever trick getting surgical privileges, Mark, but that doesn't mean you can lurk outside her door like this."

He looks almost sorry. For a second.

"Can I please just-"

"She's sleeping, Mark."

If she can lie to him, he can lie to Mark. Isn't that only fair?

"Can you at least tell her I want to see her?"

"You never give up, do you?"

Mark meets his eyes. "And you give up too easily."

For a minute they just stare at each other, not speaking.

"Stay away from her room, Mark. I know the conditions of your surgical privileges and I'd be thrilled to send you packing."

"Why haven't you told her I'm here, Derek?" Mark calls after him as he walks away. "What are you afraid of?"

The nerve. He strides fast in an attempt to walk off the anger.

"Derek?"

Meredith, a chart in her hands, drifts up to his side, keeping pace with him.

"I want Mark Sloan out of here," he says with no preamble.

"What happened? I thought you were actually getting along."

"That was before he conned his way into surgical privileges. That was when I thought he was leaving."

"He got surgical privileges?"

"He's operating on a little girl with -"

"Oh, Cristina told me about that!" She looks like she regrets her enthused tone when he turns on her. "Anyway, I heard some of the interns talking about it."

"You're not scrubbing in, are you?"

"No," she says carefully. "Cristina is, I think, if she can fight off Alex long enough, but-" she levels her gaze at him. "It's a great opportunity. For an intern, I mean. If I could scrub in, I would."

He shakes his head. He's used to feeling betrayed by now, or should be, used to the women in his life falling one by one at Mark's feet. Still, it's annoying.

"Look, Derek, I just wanted to see if you needed -"

"I don't."

"Okay." She takes a step back. "Well, just let me know."

"Thank you, Dr. Grey," he says coolly, and turns away before he can be disappointed to see whether hurt registers in her eyes.

He spares himself some pity with his next cup of coffee. He's always considered himself to be a fairly gentle soul, occasional temper notwithstanding, and the persistent stone of guilt within him is wearing him down. He swallows caffeine and lets the unwilling image swirl in the cup: Addison, pregnant with Mark's child, aborting it, flying to Seattle and never telling him? It's one more cruelty visited upon him. So ... pedestrian, really. And Mark now, here, with yet another front-page surgery. Charming the Chief who was supposed to be on Derek's side, while Derek himself hasn't cut in days. He's left with no one to talk to about it: his two best friends are the ones who betrayed him, and the woman he fell in love is out of the question. First she put up a wall between them, and then he reinforced it.

"Derek?"

Speak of the devil.

"Do you have a minute?"

He shrugs into his coffee.

"I just - I wasn't trying to be insensitive, before. I get that it's hard for you to have Mark here."

"Yeah." He looks down. Anywhere but in her eyes. "Okay."

Her voice again, pleasantly scratchy. "Are you sure you don't want to talk?"

For just a moment, the wall melts away. He sees her across the breakfast table, sharing a glass of orange juice with him. Through the lens of memory it looks like fantasy and he shakes his head at his own stupidity. The way she looks at him now is different. It's too real, too different from the hazy weeks and months when he thought she could actually be his. The flight of fancy that he could travel across the country and leave it all behind, before everything he'd left in New York picked up and followed him here. Just as he'd feared, Meredith looks at him differently now because she knows, not just about Addison but about their baby. He can see her try to piece it together. The cuckold. The cheater. The child they never got to know. He despises pity, he's vigilant and roots it out before it can fester. But she doesn't even know everything yet.

She knows about Rowan but not what came after.

It's comforting somehow to think he can still hide something; it girds him, helping him draw breath and with the security of the secret the anger is free to flood him again, and it does.

"Derek?" Meredith prompts.

"She had an abortion and didn't tell me. My _wife_," he fairly spits the word "and my best friend conceived a child while she and I were still married. And she conveniently left that part of the story out when she showed up asking me to take her back."

There's something like wistfulness in Meredith's blue eyes as she nods. "Do you think it would have been - different, if you knew?"

"Would I still have - " he breaks off before he can say _choose_. What kind of a choice is it, when you don't know the whole story? "Would I still have taken her back? I don't know." He sees her again in salmon-pink and pin curls, her pouting lips a slash of red. _Please Derek, she has no one. Someone has to fight for her. _He tries, with almost a physical strain, to shift his memories. To recolor the past. To imagine that sometime in the previous two months she'd been pregnant. _Addison, pregnant. _He tries to picture her at the appointment - probably a friend of hers - Savvy, maybe, returning the favor? Or was Mark there? Holding her hand as the doctor vacuumed away their mistake? He sees her again, stiff in black crepe, cords at her neck standing out as she finally raises her voice: _Don't you dare call it a miscarriage! That's not what he was!_

"Does she - know that you know?"

He shakes his head, wondering what the conversation might look like if she were whole. If she were healthy. _You don't even yell anymore, _she'd sighed once in New York. _Isn't that a good thing_, he didn't ask her then. Just thought about the antique vase, a wedding present, shattered on the floor of their foyer. How small she'd looked, crouched over the remains, trying to salvage the bigger pieces.

"Derek, it's not the same thing, I know. But after my mother got sick - I came back here, and I was still angry. I was angry at her, but I couldn't be. She needed me too much. So then-"

"You weren't angry anymore?"

She shakes her head. "No, I was angry at her _because_ I couldn't be angry at her. Maybe even angrier."

He ponders this for a moment, thinks about the impossibility of raging against someone virtually trapped in a hospital bed, with nothing else to do but wonder whether her arm would heal enough to allow her to cut with the precision her tiny patients required. _Down the road..._

"Did you - um, did you reach her family?" Meredith asks then, changing the subject.

"Her brother. He says he's flying out, but he's not exactly reliable, so we'll see."

Thinking about Addison's family inevitably saddens him, and he can see the moment Meredith notices his change of expression. "Is he, um-"

"He's an ass."

"Oh."

He hears Archer's glib voice on the phone, sees his mocking smile, his howl of delight. _A dessert fork! Did you hear that, Addie? Where on earth did you find this one?_

* * *

><p><strong>Thirteen Years Earlier<strong>

* * *

><p>Wet sand squelches between his toes, a salt breeze tickling his neck, mid-high sun glaring off the water. Next to him, Archer is silent - he much prefers him this way, he's decided - as they watch the little green-suited figure bobbing in the waves. Her long arms cut through the water, swift powerful strokes, and then she's swan diving right under the crest of the wave and popping up on the other side. He can see the strong current from here, and she floats briefly, letting herself drift.<p>

Another wave crashes down, larger this time, threatening to sweep her up but she just dives in again and surfaces; even from this distance, he can see her smiling. She's the only one in the water, the red flag higher up on the beach waving forlornly as she swims, then fluttering madly as the wind picks up. The waves pound the sand, licking close to his bare toes. He's musing to himself, really, not even sure why he speaks the words out loud. Maybe because he's still figuring all this out; maybe because he's forgotten who's standing next to him, probably looking at him with the same contemptuous expression he's worn since they met.

"She takes a lot of risks."

Archer shrugs. "She's a strong swimmer. We've been coming out here since we were tiny."

Out here means _the cottage,_ the rather affected name for the rambling grey shingle house. Her mother's family has the Aquinnah place (that's "the house"); the cottage is for the Montgomeries. He can't really keep up with it but things are going so well between them; he loves her (and she said she loves him too), and it's Memorial Day weekend, which means summer is coming soon but finals aren't here yet. He swallows the anxiety he feels watching her tossed around by the current, remembers the trip out here. They'd left his car in Hyannis and taken the ferry; the salt air had energized him, the cool breeze lifting her long hair. He'd convinced her to stand outside and she'd obliged, seemingly taken by his enthusiasm. They've waved to the assemblage on the dock and when the ferryboat finally gathered speed he'd leaned in and kissed her.

"What?" She pulled back, smiling but self conscious.

"Nothing." He put his arms around her and she snuggled into him and he smelled the sweetness of her wind tossed hair. "I just have a thing for ferryboats."

"Well, good." She giggled. "That's kind of convenient when you're going to an island."

Archer picked them up at the dock, giving Derek a quick once over that left him feeling about as welcome as a churchmouse and half as poor, as his father used to say. Then he studiously ignored Derek, slinging a tanned arm around his sister's neck and filling her in at top speed on Miffy this and Kippy that and who was doing what in the Arboretum or the club and all the other dog whistles Derek ignored, just breathing in the fresh salt air and enjoying the sight of Addison loping along in her white shorts and those straw-platform shoes that made her legs look even longer.

Now he stands, self-conscious in trunks, watching her enjoy herself in the waves. She'd run in the second she could, with entreaties to both men to join her.

"Is it ... safe in there, alone?" Derek asks tentatively. He's poised for Archer to ridicule him but the other man just shrugs.

"Addison's been swimming alone since she could walk."

"Seriously," he attempts and Archer waves him off.

"I am serious. No one ever wants to be in the water as much as she does so she's used to swimming alone. The flags are for amateurs. She's been doing it since I can remember. And since I'm actually a doctor unlike you kids, I can assure you that I know my memories start when I was five and she was three, so you do the math."

He's stuck on the rough blue waters, ignores the dig at their education. "In those waves?"

"You talk like someone who had parental supervision." Archer shrugs. "We had two kinds of nannies: the ones who were afraid of the ocean so they let us do our own thing, and the ones who thought kids should be tough so they -"

"Let you do your own thing?"

"Now you're catching on."

He watches again as Addison turns to them, shading her eyes with one hand and waving with the other. He waves back and she turns just in time to dive into an oncoming wave. He watches her long legs disappear into the churning water. She pops up on the other side, hair slicked back, slippery and smiling like a seal.

Archer is watching her too. "There were lifeguards at the club," he concedes, "but here she pretty much did her own thing."

The club. He doesn't ask which of the two Archer means. Derek's lone country club experience was the three summers he caddied at Shore Point to make money for college; when he mentioned this to Archer his nose wrinkled in the way one might if describing a summer spent hauling trash to Fresh Kills. It was not unlike the way Archer looked at him when he attempted to use a fish fork; later he would learn that Shore Point wasn't the sort of place the Montgomeries frequented. _There's a hierarchy for that too? _he asked Addison, and she blushed. _Oh, it doesn't matter, _she scoffed, but he took her silence to mean yes: there's a hierarchy for everything.

Now he studies Archer carefully. He doesn't see much of Addison in the shorter, stockier man except for the pale eyes, the prominent cheekbones. Archer's dark-blond hair is swept back, that oh-so-casual-don't-care look Derek remembers well from his caddying years. For the most part, he's been an ass - an unwelcoming ass. Derek has only one little sister and he left home long before he could exert any kind of protective streak over her dating life, and his older sisters always made it very clear that Derek had nothing to do with their exploits with boys. But he can grudgingly accept that Archer might be protective, and that two siblings might be different from five. _Five kids? _Archer hooted the first time he heard. _What are you, half rabbit? _Addison had kicked him with a sandy bare foot. _Stop it, Archie, don't be awful. _

There's a lot he doesn't like about Addison's brother: the way Archer talks to the caddies at the club, the way his eyes raked over Kathleen that time they all met up in the city, the way he likes to remind Derek that he'll never quite fit into their lifestyle. _She's a thoroughbred,_ Archer said, nauseatingly, the first time he and Derek met. _And you - _ Derek had protested. _I'm in medical school, Archer, I'm not exactly on the bread line. _Archer had shaken his head. _You just don't get it._ And maybe he didn't.

But now Archer is watching Addison in the water and his face looks almost soft.

"She loves it out here."

Derek nods. It's pretty much what Addison said when she invited him. _We practically grew up out there, and I want you to see it. _He just swallowed, thought of the little no-frills cabin his parents rented the few summers they could scrape together the money. Camping in a trailer on Hammonasset Beach when business was bad at the store, the kids sleeping under the August stars. He can't imagine telling Addison that story, can almost hear her horrified squeak ("A _trailer_?") so he keeps it to himself. At school they're equals: they sit on twin-height lab stools and study together on rolling library chairs; at night, they curl up in his rusting dorm-issue bed and wait for his next-door neighbor to bang on the door and remind them to keep it down.

Out here, though. Derek's no fool; you can't grow up in Connecticut without understanding the disparities of wealth. All it took was those few summers working at a country club - _here, take this, I'm sure you can use it next year in college_ - hefting golf bags for men who made lunch trades worth more than his father had earned in a year.

"She's a decent sailor, too." Archer is still talking, his eyes faraway with memory. "The Captain used to take her out when she was about this big." His hand floats to the knee of his khaki shorts.

_The Captain._ Derek still hasn't met the man, but he knows who he is. These words, these terms. The Captain. Bizzy. Addison and Archer speak in what sounds like code to him half the time, finishing each other's sentences and making each other laugh. It's reminiscences on top of memories all washed down with copious amounts of alcohol - he'd known Addison could put it away, but Archer had her beat and seemed always to have a drink in his hand. He took their battered jeep to Oak Bluffs the first night and came back with a trunk of bottles; this, too, made Addison laugh hysterically. "Remember when Chip -" "But he had no idea that we-" "And the cutty was never-" "-the same after that!" Derek just nods along at the siblings in these moments; he can't help but notice how happy Addison looks with her brother, digging a friendly elbow into his side or ribbing him about his latest conquests.

"Does he remind you a little of Mark?" Derek asked her the first time he met Archer.

"Archie?" Addison squeaked. "Seriously? No way." She shook her head, looking faintly repulsed. "I mean, Archer's Archer but Mark is - "

"Hey," he reproved. "He's my best friend."

"I know that, but there's no accounting for tas- hey, Derek!" and she squealed as he tickled her, forgetting their moment of disagreement.

Derek nods at Archer now. Addison had mentioned that sailing tidbit to him, proudly - that it was _their thing_. He'd been taken with the image of a tiny pigtailed Addison in a little white sailor cap, learning the ropes at her father's knee.

"It was their thing or, you know, that's what he said to get her to do it. You'd be amazed how much attention you get from women when you have a redheaded toddler changing the rudder and babbling about wind shear in that little pipsqueak voice." Archer shakes his head, his tone affectionate. "And I think the Captain checked every once in a while to see if she'd been tossed overboard - that counts as parental involvement, right?"

Derek glances at him, not responding, and just lets the words sink in. His image of Little Addison the Pampered First Mate disappears into the waves; instead he sees her sitting small and ignored off the side of the boat, little shoes dangling.

Archer seems to notice his expression. "Hey, it got her some fresh air. And sea legs. And a couple of medals." He says something else, presumably about the sailboat, that goes right over Derek's head and Archer picks up on it.

"You don't sail?"

Derek shakes his head, thinking of all the conversations he hasn't been quite able to join this long weekend, and the others, and takes a chance: "You really have no idea how much money is involved in those 'sports,' do you."

Archer cocks his head. "I never thought about it that way." His tone is mild, not mocking, for once, so Derek's answer is honest.

"People with money never do."

Addison interrupts them then, running out of the water and up the beach in a way that makes his pulse pound, her dark green one-piece all the more alluring for its relative modesty. Her pumping legs are endless, and she's laughing - she's always laughing here.

"Derek! You have to come in, the water's _glorious_!" He winces at the word, at the stifling _Montgomery _flavor of it, but he can't help smiling back. She's shaking herself out and he has the image of an Irish setter, red hair splashing him, and then she grabs both his hands. "Come in with me!"

"I don't know..."

"Aren't the waves a little rough, Addie?"

Derek throws Archer a grateful look but Addison makes a face. "Don't be silly, Archie, Derek loves to swim."

She tugs him in after her and as soon as the first wave crashes into his knees he knows he's unmatched. "Addison, I think Archer might be right."

"But you love the water!" Addison is plunging ahead, her fingers drifting away from his. She jumps easily as a wave approaches, floating on it for a moment like a mermaid, her long wet hair spread around her. He jumps awkwardly, a moment too late, and gets a mouthful of seaweedy salt.

"You used to go to the beach," Addison protests, reaching for his hand again.

"The Sound, though." Derek pushes further into the crashing waves, waiting for Addison's signal to jump this time, and he makes it. "Or the lake. It's not exactly like this."

"Come on, we just have to go deeper."

"Deeper?" He hears himself sounding alarmed.

"Just past the break, then it will be easy."

It's nothing like easy as they push ahead, Addison darting ahead and then coming back for him, warning him when to jump. He sees where the waves break, the crashing white caps, and he gives her a nervous glance. "Addison, are you sure-"

"Trust me." Her eyes sparkle beneath a wet fringe of lashes, and she grabs his hand again. "Dive!"

And she disappears under the wave that smacks him in the face, knocking him off his feet and pushing him under, around, filling his mouth with salt and sand and - then he breaks the surface, coughing.

"You did it!" Addison is beaming, treading water, her lightly freckled shoulders bobbing in and out of the endless blue.

He coughs again, rubs his hand across his nose. He sees a wave approaching and steels himself; to his surprise, it passes under them with relatively gentleness; they rise softly with it and the sensation of drowning disappears. It's almost calm, suddenly, the worst of it behind them and in front of them: endless blue.

"See, I told you." Addison paddles to him, wraps her arms around his neck. "We just had to get past the break. Now it's smooth sailing."

He hears the word sailing and sees her as a small child again, delighted to have a day out with her father. Archer's words hang in the air. It's Addison's version he wants to believe, her father finding an activity where they could be together, get to know each other, but then he sees her sitting alone on the boat, little feet swinging, while the Captain talks to something tanned in a bikini. He thinks of Addison grabbing his hand, pulling him toward the water, the way her body moved over his last night, the way she pulled him into the cabana shed that morning. _Addison, what are you doing? Just showing you how I feel,_ she giggled. _Just saying hi._ Or _just reminding you._ He didn't ask: _reminding me of what? _How many beaches had she run down, hand outstretched, fingers empty? He's filled with tenderness and his arms are filled with the warm weight of her, squirming pleasantly against him, her powerful legs churning the water around him. Maybe she's keeping them both afloat. He kisses the tip of her nose and she smiles at him, salt in her arched eyebrows.

"Glorious, right?"

He leans forward and captures her lips with his; she tastes like salt - waves of it, like the ocean, wet and warm. The contrast of her cool damp cheek and the heat of her mouth goes straight to his groin. Another wave laps at them, rocking them and he holds her tighter, kisses the cold flesh at her neck, threads one hand into her long wet hair.

"Right," he admits.

Dimly he's aware of Archer calling to them and he turns around, Addison still in his arms, to see her brother scowling at the shore, both hands propped on his hips. There are two women - girls, really - talking to him who, from this distance at least, barely look like they've graduated high school. Lovely.

"Get a room, will you?" Archer yells, loudly enough to be heard over the waves.

Derek flushes. "Sorry, Addie, maybe we should."

"Forget it. He's not the boss of me." And she leans in closer, dipping her head, her lips doing ridiculously pleasurable things to the skin behind his ear and the sun is hot and the waves are refreshingly cold and they're past the break now, they're safe, and Archer's not really mad - he's half-smiling, even from here it's obvious - and it smells incredible out here, barbecues fired up on the shore, the salt tang of the ocean, everything right with the world and the thump of her heart and she slides a thigh between his and it's too much, too much sensation - a word he'd never use, a stupid WASP word but there it is-

It's _glorious_.

* * *

><p>"He's ... mostly an ass, anyway."<p>

Derek shakes his head to clear the memory of Archer's expression as he watched Addison in the ocean, his softening eyes. He thinks about how long ago that perfect late-afternoon swim was. How Archer had gone right back to his old self once they made it to shore, asking Derek to choose the wine and then hooting with delight at his random selection, the way Addison had glared at him. _It's not funny, Archie, leave him alone! _And Derek had swung his head between the pair of him like he was at one of their notorious tennis matches.

"Do you think he'll come out here?"

He makes a helpless sort of shrug because the Montgomery siblings are predictable in many ways, sure, but he's found over the years that they always have a way of surprising him.

He makes his way to the OR board, reads it almost wistfully, never having thought of surgery as a spectator sport. Lost in the hastily scrawled marker, he doesn't turn around at the familiar voice.

"Derek."

"Just go, Mark. Make a hero of yourself, fine, and then get out of here."

"This surgery is going to change that little girl's life."

Derek turns around now and takes in the smug expression, the neat sutures sealing the gash his fist made. The white lab coat. "And get you published, you mean."

"Yeah, it will get me published." He rolls his neck, cracking it. "What, you want an apology for that? The Great Derek Shepherd doesn't care about his career all of a sudden?"

"There are more important things than that."

Mark laughs, a short, humorless bark. "You always had a good poker face, Derek, but you'll have to do better than that."

"Forget it." He shakes his head. Three thousand miles and he can't get rid of either of them. The uncharitable thought makes him feel guilty - _as usual_ - and he glares at the other man for another second before pulling his blackberry out of its holder and scrolling through his emails, trying to forget who's standing in front of him.

"Look, Derek, I want to see Addison - I'm not pretending I don't - but it's not just Addison. I want you back, too."

He glances up briefly. "I'm not going to sleep with you, Mark."

"Noted. But for the record, you don't know what you're missing."

"Actually, I had a front row seat, remember? Just looked like treachery to me."

"Gentlemen."

Richard, purpose in his step and his voice, and Derek throws him a grateful look. Mark, apparently not willing to push his luck with an award-winning surgery on the table, makes himself scarce. Derek listens as Richard, gesturing to the board, proposes that he take over a surgery.

Derek looks up, surprised. "It's assigned."

"The sooner we can get McKee back to St. Angela's, the better," Richard says ruefully.

Derek studies the board again. It's a straightforward endovascular coiling; the patient's already in prep by the looks of the schedule.

"I know it's just a simple procedure, but I'd like to get you back in the game."

Derek checks his watch. There's a good six-hour window before Addison needs to walk; at his pace and with no complications, the surgery will take half that time. "Of course."

It's a relief to scrub in, and he borrows one of his mother's old expressions: a sheer, blessed relief. She used it for the sanctity of Catholic ritual after she lost her husband, for lighting candles and serving semi-stale church casseroles to five fatherless children. There was relief in ritual, in giving over to sheer muscle memory, and he embraces it now. Instead of kneeling he turns away, reverently, from the scrub nurse; instead of the thick leather step under his knees he feels the snug choke of the collar as his gown is secured behind him.

Inside the OR, as it always does, time stops.

Time belongs to him in this room. It is his mistress: it speeds up at his will, it slows down, it freezes in the icy chill of the room under the bright white lights. It's a simple procedure, one he could do in his sleep, but as his fingers move and the room bustles he's grateful to Richard for realizing exactly what he needed.

There's some surprise bleeding but he fixes it easily and the surgery is a success. He takes his time scrubbing out, quizzing the intern on the procedure, on follow-up care, until he's satisfied. He doesn't register the time until he's shouldered his white coat again, his hand on his blackberry, halfway toward the nurse's station for a cup of coffee he can almost taste.

_Shit._

He covers the hallway quickly but by the look of it, he's minutes too late; he opens the door to see they're helping her back into bed.

Dr. Bailey turns fierce eyes on him, one hand on Addison's good arm.

"How did it-"

"She did great." Dr. Bailey announces. "No thanks to you," she adds in a hiss. Addison's back is to him, taut and still and he can't tell if she heard.

Derek spreads his hands, familiar feeling of guilt reaching his palms. "I was in the OR. There was a complication."

Bailey shakes her head and he thinks he hears her muttering _complications_ under her breath.

"Dr. Shepherd."

He looks up, not having noticed the other man in the room, and nods. "Dr. Burke. What are you doing here?"

He smiles patiently and speaks with his typical formality. "Dr. Bailey has many talents-"

She makes a _hrmph_ sort of sound at that.

"-but there is one area in which my particular gifts exceed hers."

He blinks, not comprehending.

"Height." It's the ortho resident again, the one whose name he can't remember, with the black hair. She's tall, eye to eye with him, and he realizes what she means. She narrows her eyes at him slightly.

He swallows, finally getting it. They would have walked her between two people of her own height or taller, needing that security for her first steps out of bed. The resident - Torres, now he remembers - is glaring at him. Burke is still smiling serenely in a way that irks him and Bailey looks like she'd like to slap him. Ruefully, he shakes his head, remembers being somewhat well liked in this hospital before his wife blew into town.

_When are you going to get back on your broom and go back to New York where you belong?_

If they knew he was feeling sorry for himself instead of Addison, how much more contemptuous would they look? But then his wife makes a small sound as Bailey eases her onto the bed and his stomach twists.

"Addison-"

Bailey is talking over him. "You were fantastic, Dr. Montgomery-Shepherd."

"Addison," she croaks.

"Addison, okay. You did great. Now you know you should expect to be-"

"Exhausted," Addison finishes. She's pale, perspiration dotting her upper lip. Bailey fusses with the covers and then takes a step back, crossing her arms.

"We'll leave you two alone then." She looks as if she's not at all sure it's a good idea, but the room empties, the door swinging shut with finality.

He meets her eye carefully and she speaks first. "Hi."

"I'm sorry I missed it."

_How often has he said those words?_

She shrugs slightly, just her good shoulder lifting, and he sees her wince.

"Addison," he tries gently. "It's going to take time."

"Spare me." She studies her good hand for a moment, then turns her bruised face toward him. "I get it, Derek, okay? I'm a doctor too, remember? I've had-" she breaks off, then says the word like a wound - "_surgery_ before."

"Okay." He takes her hand, trying hard to keep his tone patient. "So you know that it's normal to be tired-"

"I know that!" It's clear from her expression that the exclamation hurt. She lowers her voice, takes a shaky breath. "I ran the Manhattan half three years in a row, Derek, so if it's not too much to ask, I would just like a _minute_ to get my head around the fact that it's fucking exhausting to walk six feet down the hall."

He looks down, chastened. "Right."

_If you don't want me here and I don't want to be here, what the hell are we doing?_

_So go, then! Walk away!_

"I'll leave you alone then," he says tentatively and she purses her lips, not responding.

"You know how to reach me." He can't read the expression on her face. "Get some rest." He leans over to kiss her, muscle memory taking over and leading him to plant a marital peck on her pursed lips, a fraction of a second before he realizes his mistake.

She cries out at the contact with her stitches, tears springing to her eyes.

Shit.

"Addison, I'm sorry." _Shit. _"I'm sorry, it was just - " _habit._ The word almost slips out. How many times has he kissed her like that, how many quick hellos or soft good nights or brisk good lucks?

"It's okay." Her voice is raspy again; she draws a shaky breath and raises a hand toward her mouth slowly, almost in wonder.

"Can I-" he gestures to her face.

She nods and he takes a glove from the box by her bed.

She holds very still as he leans over her, carefully taking her chin in his bare hand. Between his fingers her strong jaw feels oddly delicate. A surge of something washes through him, a feeling he can't quite identify. Choosing action over insight, he uses his gloved thumb to pull down her lower lip as gently as he can.

"Ow."

"Sorry. I just need to look-"

The inside of her lip is pink and raw looking, making him swallow hard, but the stitches are neat and pristine, undisturbed. He removes both his hands, strips off the glove and discards it before addressing her again.

"I'm sorry, Addie. That was careless of me."

"It's fine."

"You're okay?"

She gives him a sad half-smile. "Yeah. I'm okay."

Only one eye is visible and it's very bright. He could fall into those eyes. He has, he thinks, in the past, their teary indescribable color doing him in, one stupid choice at a time.

_There's no anesthesia in sight. _

"Do-over?"

She furrows her brow, confused.

He leans over carefully and kisses her again, next to her mouth this time, well away from the stitches.

"Better?"

"Much."

For a long moment he just looks at her.

"What?"

"Nothing."

He's not even sure himself.

So for another minute they just look at each other. The secrets between them are an ocean, a bridge he can't bring himself to cross. The break past which things might get easier - or the undertow that could finish them off once and for all.

"Addison-"

His pager interrupts them and he smiles in spite of himself at the message, pleased that for once he can deliver to Addison exactly what she wants.

His brother-in-law is charming the nurses when he gets there - with what, Derek isn't sure, but he's seen the effect Archer has on women. Seen it, resented it, judged him for it.

"Derek!" Archer smiles broadly, and Derek wonders if he's been clear enough about why exactly they're here.

"You should prepare yourself," he tells Archer, like he has a hundred times before, as he leads him to Addison's room. But Archer just brushes it off.

"When has Addison not looked great?"

That's right. Archer never made it to the hospital last time; none of her family did. It was his mother fussing over her in the hospital bed, his sisters helping her to bathe and dress.

"You said she was doing well," he reminds Derek.

Derek nods. "She came through the surgery well, she's been up and walking-" he winces slightly with guilt at the recollection of that - "but she's been through a lot, Archer, and she's exhausted."

"Then let's not tire her out making her wait." And he pushes the door open.

"Archer, you came!" It's the happiest he's seen her look since-

_Hey, Dr. Shepherd - her glass lifted in greeting, a grin splitting her face, soft and welcoming in that white sweater._

_Dr. Shepherd - his own tumbler raised, toasting her back._

-he pushes the thought out of his mind. "Come in," Addison beckons her brother with her good hand.

But Archer stops so suddenly in the doorway that Derek crashes into his back. In spite of himself, Derek starts to feel sorry for him. "It's not as bad as it looks," he mutters, lying through his teeth, hoping Addison can't hear him. "Go on in. It's fine."

Addison is beaming, or what can pass for beaming through the swelling and bruises and Derek tries to distract her from the horror on Archer's face, helping her adjust the level of the bed and her pillows.

"Why don't you sit down, Archer - _Archer_," he says sharply when the other man continues to stare. He pulls out the chair by Addison's bed. "Have a seat. I'll leave you two alone."

But Archer is still looking at him with what seems like desperation, his eyes darting from Addison to Derek to the door.

"Sit down, Archer," Derek offers again, more firmly this time. He smiles at Addison. "I'll let you two catch up-"

"No, I - excuse me-" and then Archer's gone, the door swinging shut behind him.

Derek and Addison exchange a glance.

Addison speaks first: "Go see if he's okay?"

Derek shakes his head.

"Derek, please."

"Fine."

When he leans over to kiss her the hurt is evident in her eyes.

"Be nice!" she calls after him, just like old times.

He checks the nurses station to no avail - Archer must really be falling apart, because that dark-haired nurse no one can help noticing is at work behind the desk. With a sigh, he pushes open the door of the men's room, hoping he'll be wrong. Archer's there all right, in the open door of one of the stalls, crouched over on his haunches and throwing up.

Derek runs a frustrated hand through his hair. With needy people everywhere, there's no chance for him even to sit with his anger.

Steeling himself, he approaches Archer.

His brother-in-law stands up, breathing shakily, wiping a hand across his mouth. "Sorry."

Derek leans against the wall, folding his arms, and nods. Archer scoops a handful of water from the sink into his mouth, rinses slowly, spits. He rubs his face.

"It's just - god, I didn't realize."

Derek studies him. He seems sincere, the color leached out of his face, the wide, pale eyes he shares with his sister watery with pain.

"How could someone do that to her?"

Derek shakes his head. "It's - I know it's hard to take in."

"_You're_ cool as a cucumber." Archer's tone is bitter.

Is he? He thinks of the way she tried to scream, the first day they cleaned her wounds. Remembers getting in her face as she panicked, his own heart only slowing when her breaths did. Letting his fingers linger on the smooth undamaged skin of her cheek.

"I've had more time to get used to it," he says finally.

"Is she really going to be okay?"

Derek pushes off the wall. "Yes. There's going to be some work, down the road..."

_There's that line again._

"...but she's going to be okay.

"Her face," he whispers and Derek's watching his misty pale eyes and sees the moment pain turns to memory.

"I remember when she..." his voice trails off, then starts again, stronger "We were riding our bikes on the Vineyard and she did a full-gainer off the handlebars. She was about six and her-" his hand flickers across his own face - "it was all busted up, blood everywhere, totally freaking out. I was so scared," he admits. He looks down at his hands. "She's my baby sister, you know? It was my job to protect her and she was hurt. And she was scared. So I had to pretend I wasn't scared so I could keep her calm and we were about a mile from the cottage and - the whole time I was carrying her back I just kept thinking about her face." He takes a deep, shaky breath. "She had that little space between her front teeth, you know?" Derek does know, he remembers from pictures, and he sees this small version of his wife clearly in his mind's eye as Archer talks. "And she was always wiggling them, waiting for them to fall out and she was so excited for the tooth fairy to come and I was thinking she'd messed up her face forever and it was my fault. And she asked me if she was going to be okay and what did I know? I was just a kid and there was so much blood but I told her it would be okay and I carried her home."

Archer's chest is heaving visibly but he swallows hard, gets control of himself, and Derek tactfully gives him a moment. In the silence he pictures the Montgomery siblings as small children - they're not that far apart in age, Addison inheriting the Captain's longer bone structure and Archer Bizzy's more petite stature, so he probably wasn't even that much bigger than Addison was the day of that bike accident. He thinks of Archer carrying his little sister home, assuring her she would be okay, and his voice is thicker than he expects when he speaks.

"Listen, she's going to look more like herself as she heals. They - they did a good job," he says finally.

Archer nods, staring at the tiled floor.

"It's still Addison in that bed, Archer. I'm not going to speak to her taste but she loves you and she's happy to see you and I think you're going to regret it if you can't go back in there."

He nods, rinsing his mouth at the sink again. He gulps, spits out a mouthful, takes another.

In spite of himself Derek feels some pity. "Why don't you get some air, a cup of coffee..." his voice trails off. "She's not going anywhere."

"How is he?" Addison asks eagerly when Derek walks back in.

"He's fine. He's still an ass," he adds, unable to help himself and at the expression in Addison's eyes he sighs. "He'll be back. He's just ... getting some coffee."

She shakes her head, carefully. "I look that bad..." her voice trails off, somewhere between a question and a realization. "I must. But - the rest of you didn't make it seem so ..."

He sits down next to her. "He was surprised, Addison, that's all."

"Derek..."

"It's going to take time." He parrots the words that annoy him and she makes a frustrated gesture with her good hand. _Something we agree on. _

"I want to - I think I want to see it." Her uninjured hand drifts toward her face and automatically he catches it in his own, lowering it gently back down.

"I don't know, Addison."

"It's my face, Derek."

"Of course it is." He studies the battered flesh, the sutures visible where the tiny metal plate ensured the future of her vision and the shape of her face. Those elegant cheekbones. The bruising at her neck is harmless - he almost laughs at the inappropriateness of the term - but it's jarring, speaking of a struggle and pain and other things he hasn't yet allowed himself to think about. She's watching him, waiting for a response, so he punts. "Can I just see what-" he stops, wisely, before saying _counselor_- "what your surgical team thinks?"

She nods, the sanctity of medicine saving them from another uncomfortable conversation, and they sit in relatively calm silence waiting for Archer to pull himself together.

It's not long.

"Addie!" Archer swings through the doorway, a big smile on his face. From where Derek stands it looks plastered on but it's better than nothing. He's washed his face, his color is back, and Derek remembers the Montgomery gift - or curse - for looking unruffled in crisis.

Archer approaches the bed. "I'm sorry about before, I -"

"I'm just happy to see you, Archie." She extends her good hand. "Come sit?"

He takes the chair next to the bed, smiling shakily at her.

"It's not as bad as it looks," she says bravely.

And then - suddenly and with no warning - Archer is crying, the choked, ugly cries of someone not used to making a noise, his shoulders shaking. Embarrassed, Derek starts to turn his back. Addison is tearless but looking with something between confusion and horror at her brother. Goddamn selfish Montgomeries, holding it together and falling apart at all the wrong times.

More sounds escape Archer, he's losing control and Derek wonders if he should do something. But he's frozen with indecision; it's Addison who acts. She lifts her good hand, presses it to her brother's cheek. "It's okay," she murmurs, just once. And they sit there like that, Archer crying and Addison, silent, cupping his face.

Derek steps out to give them privacy, closes the door behind him with barely disguised relief.

He's exhausted; he can't remember an encounter with the Montgomery family that hasn't left him feeling the same way. Tired. Relieved that it's over. Faintly guilty. He leans against the wall, scrolls through his messages. Missed calls from his mother, all three of his older sisters - Amy, the baby, will be squirreled away in a library somewhere, making up for her past misdeeds. If only his own penance could be so simple.

He checks on his post-op patient, guides two interns through the follow-up procedures and finishes some paperwork in his office, studiously avoiding the large file folder containing Addison's scans. He's looked at them enough. Nothing will change. He still hasn't been back to the trailer and he rebuffs Richard's entreaties and Bailey's barely-concealed threats one more time. "Tomorrow," he assures them, because there's a bed in his office anyway and he's not yet ready to face that open plot of land, the mist rising off the lake.

He goes to Addison's room instead to check on her; she's half asleep, the chair by her bed empty. She stirs awake when he approaches her.

"Archer left?"

"He went to his hotel."

At his silence she shakes her head. "It's hard for him, Derek."

_It's hard for both of you._

He takes her hand automatically as he sits down in the chair her brother vacated. She turns slightly to face him and their eyes lock. That's when it happens.

He couldn't describe it if you asked him in the moment, he'd only be able to mutter vague, meaningless things - _fifteen years_ and _family_ and _there's a lot we don't know about the brain. _But he could swear he sees the light in her eyes change and the grasp on his fingers tighten when she speaks.

"You know."

He doesn't have to ask what she means and she doesn't have to explain. Two words hang in their air between them. It seems terribly important for some reason not to let go of her hand, so he simply nods. His affirmation seems to undo her; her fingers go limp within his.

He just holds on, waiting to see if the shattering of this secret will push them past the break - or sweep them underwater one last time.

* * *

><p><em>Reviews are warmly welcomed and greatly appreciated. <em>


	11. Chapter 11

**Author's Note:** One of my New Year's resolutions is to finish this story. I know it's been an incredibly long time since I've updated, but a recent near-computer-crash reminded me I have about 30,000 words of this story sitting around waiting for me to organize it. So here's chapter 11, and with it, the all-important question: is anyone but me still reading? Let me know, and I'll do my best to get the rest out of my head/hard drive and onto this site. Merry Christmas!

* * *

><p><strong>The Climbing Way<br>****Chapter Eleven**

* * *

><p><em>He just holds on, waiting to see if the shattering of this secret will push them past the break - or sweep them underwater one last time.<em>

Addison loved New Year's resolutions. No, _loves_, he corrects himself - present tense, her soft limp hand within his testament to that.

The chance to reinvent herself appealed to her, he knew, and she'd find some creative way to express her resolutions every year. On Chinese fortune cookies. On the little chalkboard that hung in the pantry of their brownstone. But her favorite was to write them in the sand. They spent a wintry New Year at the house in the Hamptons several times - first rentals and then their own. They'd bundle up in coats and hats, take a bottle of champagne down to the beach and etch their resolutions in the wet sand with pointy sticks. Then they'd watch the waves wash them away. Even with the sand battered smooth, Addison would swear she could still see the words.

Now it's her words that hang in the air, this New Year's Eve. He can't see them, but he can feel them.

_You know._

He doesn't say anything, but he doesn't deny it, letting the moment of marital prescience unfold of its own accord. Really, he's had more time than she has to grow accustomed to the idea. Since the moment they wheeled her into surgery and he figured out what she'd neglected to tell him: that whatever happened between his wife and his best friend in New York had left her pregnant and that four years after the thing they didn't talk about, she'd terminated the pregnancy and neglected to mention it when she arrived in Seattle. When she asked him to take her back.

He could pretend he doesn't really know, avoid the issue altogether, but -

"You're not good at - hiding things," she whispers. Her voice is hoarse; tears are gathering in the corners of her visible eye.

"You're better at it than I am." He keeps his tone gentle. He's tired, hanging on to her curling fingers like an oar. "You hid this."

She makes a slight movement that he thinks might be a shake of her head, but seems to think better of it. "Derek, I couldn't-"

"We don't need to talk about it now."

How many conversations between them have ended that way?

But now she tries again to shake her head, and a sharp sound escapes her. He touches the uninjured side of her face. "Addison. Take it easy." She's still recovering from surgery, and he can't ask the question he wants to ask, can't demand to know what else it is that he doesn't know. Remembers Mark's taunt: _you don't know as much as you think you know, about what happened in New York. _

She looks away, mumbling something that sounds like "I should have told you."

He leans in. "What did you say?"

Her voice is easier to understand now after she draws a slow, labored breath: "Should I have told you?" she asks. This time, the last syllable lifts in a clear question.

There's no rulebook for this. "I ... don't know."

"Derek, please-"

But then he sees her wet-haired and wild eyed on the stairs of the brownstone, begging him, and his chest tightens.

_Please, Derek, you have to give me a chance to explain!_

"Addison, it's okay. Calm down."

Her fingers dig into his and he resists the urge to pull away, his own panic battling with his fear of hers. Her breath is coming faster now and as her pulse jumps an alarm sounds, the door to the room swinging open.

"What's the matter?"

_Everything._

He's at a loss for words, imagines for a darkly comic moment actually telling the anxious resident the truth. _Well, you see, it turns out that my wife here aborted my best friend's lovechild and somehow forgot to tell me that when she showed up in Seattle and asked me to take her back. Did I mention I might have fallen in love with someone else too? And that my ex is her doctor now? And wait - just to make things a little bit more interesting, the father - my ex-best-friend - he's here too. High publicity surgery, high drama. He's in his element. And me? I'm far from mine. I'm actually kind of screwed._

He just sits there silently instead, still holding her hand. Her fingers feel loose within his, flexing with her labored breaths.

"Dr. Montgomery-Shepherd? Are you in pain?" It's an attending he doesn't recognize now.

She shakes her head frantically and then a gasp of pain interrupts her denial. Other people's hands are soothing her now, quieting her. Finally, her eyes lock on Derek's and he forces himself to smile reassuringly.

"You're going to be fine," he tells her. When he was clinging her grip had felt loose but now he has to use his other hand to pry her fingers from his. Her lips part and a shaky breath that sounds like his name starts to escape just before another pained-sounding gasp.

Then someone injects something into her IV and he sees her start to relax, her eyes fluttering closed.

All eyes in the room turn to him.

"What happened?" they ask.

He shakes his head.

_If only I knew. _

When he's alone with her again he sinks into the chair by her bed. He thinks he should tell Archer, maybe sleep or grab a shower - but as little as he wants to face the things unsaid between them, there's a magnetic pull keeping him by her side.

"Dr. Shepherd-"

"Addison," she corrects huskily.

"Addison," Bailey repeats. "Are you in pain now?"

"No."

"What happened before?"

He can _feel _Addison's gaze drifting toward his, and he trains his eyes stubbornly on the linoleum floor. He thinks he can also feel Bailey glaring at him.

No one answers.

"I need you to tell me when you're in pain so we can keep you appropriately medicated. The tissue will heal better when the nerves aren't overstimulated. This is coming from Dr. Liu so you can just blame him," and she smiles at Addison, catching Derek slightly off guard. Is there anyone in the hospital Addison hasn't charmed?

The uncharitable thought embarrasses him.

Addison, better than he is, looks small and stoic in the hospital bed, such a slight rise under the covers. His gaze falls on her flat stomach and he thinks unwillingly of his child and of Mark's. He has a sudden childish urge to beg her for a promise: _Let's pretend I never found out. _Every last painful moment since he was awakened by Richard's call has felt only half-real anyway, those strange phantom days strung out between Christmas and New Year's like fairy lights. If only he could close his eyes and erase them.

"I really don't remember," Addison says then, abruptly, and he's not sure what she's referring to - their conversation after she woke up from surgery, or the episode directly afterwards, or the circumstances of her injuries.

He just nods, waiting for her to continue.

She's speaking quietly, conversationally almost. "My leg, my - " she waves her good hand in the general area of her damaged flesh. "I was tired, before, I didn't - how bad is it?"

"The team says your prognosis is good."

"Chief Herman used to say if a doctor answers a different question from the one the patient asks that's not a good sign."

He looks down at the white coverlet on the bed, stares hard enough to trace the individual fibers. "I'm not your doctor, Addison."

"Did they find my car?" She asks the question so casually that he looks up, startled.

"You remember the-"

"Miranda told me."

Oh. He doesn't respond. He considers saying _I would have told you_ except he's not sure it's true; considers asking _why didn't you just ask me?_ except that he understands. He's not sure why they're talking about her car, or even her prognosis, while everything else hangs unsaid between them. But then again -

He swallows, hard. This is their hallmark, isn't it? Unable to have the difficult conversations. Not asking the questions for which they won't like the answers. It's just a sign of how bad things have gotten that her injuries have become the easier topic to discuss.

"I don't really remember anything anyway," she offers, giving them both an easy way out.

"Okay." He thinks about how to raise the issue the social worker has been pressing. "Listen, Addison, maybe you want to talk to someone-"

"There's nothing to talk about."

Of course. He smiles briefly at her, thinks that if ever there were a Montgomery-Shepherd marital crest, that would be its motto. Along with a picture of something - a tumbler of scotch? An empty bed? Maybe a door closing, like the one behind him.

* * *

><p><strong>Seven Years Earlier<strong>

* * *

><p>The door swings shut behind her and he pushes it back open, following her outside. In the den, Mark, Nancy and her husband Don are still in a picture perfect circle by the roaring fire, a deck of cards spread between them. Derek can hear Mark cheerfully suggesting strip poker as the door closes behind him.<p>

"Addie, don't do this."

He grabs both their coats from the hooks by the front door, trails her down the flagstone steps.

"It's just frustrating." She stops halfway to the gazebo and doesn't resist when he drapes her puffy white coat over her shoulders.

"I'm sorry," he offers, more as a preventative than a cure. Save her tears, save his having to inquire what's wrong. It's not that he doesn't care, it's that he doesn't always know what's expected of him. _Remember, _he told her once, _I've never seen a marriage up close. Not really. _She'd widened her eyes at that, those beautiful sad eyes. _Neither have I, Derek. _He reminded her that her parents had been married for decades, her father still alive and well. _My point exactly,_ she'd said, then changed the subject with a tinkling laugh, her highly distracting legs crossing in that way that stole his breath.

There was so much he didn't know then.

Now, as he shrugs into the ski jacket she bought for him - before taking him skiing for the first time, much to her brother's patronizing delight - he thinks about what it means to know someone better, about the fine line between _predict_ and _prevent_.

They walk silently, in step, to the gazebo. She leans against the newel post, waiting for him, and he realizes he's not sure he wants to have this conversation after all.

"Look, Addie, we don't have to talk about this right now." He digs his hands into his pockets, looking for gloves or warmth and finding neither; the nylon is bare and chilly against his fingers. "Mom was just calling to wish us a happy new year."

"And to drop more hints."

"She was just kidding." He defends his mother to her automatically, as he defends Addison to Mom when she makes occasional comments about the daughter-in-law who is _just a little different from what I expected, Derek._

"What about you?" She turns her face to his and in the low lamplight - it's yellow and dreamy, reflecting off the frosty grass - her eyes are a bottomless blue. "Are you just kidding?"

"I didn't say anything."

"But you want it, Derek."

He nods slowly. "Yeah. I do want it. When we're ready."

"You're-"

"No, it's _us_, not me, that matters. When we're both ready."

She sniffles and he thinks he's said the right thing, for once, and then kicks himself for taking it one step too far: "But what is it, Addie, why is it so crazy to think that maybe we'd be ready - soon?"

Her eyes darken and he rests a tentative hand on her shoulder.

"Maybe it's that I was raised by wolves." She smiles when she says it, but the smile doesn't reach her eyes. "Or my job, Derek, I've seen just about everything that can go wrong with a pregnancy. And more."

"But that doesn't mean anything." He pulls her closer. "Our baby would be perfect."

"Derek, don't say things like that!" She draws back, looking annoyed.

"Sorry." He waits for her to lean against him again. "I just mean - the odds of a problem are slim, Addie, you're still young-"

She snorts.

"You are."

"Your mother doesn't think so."

"How did she get back into this?"

"Derek, she gave me a scrapbooking kit for Christmas!"

"What's so bad about that? She got me a book on fly fishing."

"That's different."

"They're both hobbies."

"Okay, seriously, Derek, you cannot compare those gifts. First of all," and she ticks the examples off on her hands as she is wont to do, which he usually finds cute, "You actually _like_ fishing, not that I support that vile habit, but just to be clear; and I certainly don't like scrapbooking. _Scrapbooking_, Derek!"

"Second of all?" he prompts.

"Second of all, it could not be a bigger hint."

"How so?"

"A scrapbooking kit just says 'why haven't you given my son a baby yet,' but with crafts."

He smiles in spite of himself. "Addie, don't you think you're being a little sensitive?"

"No." she scowls, but doesn't really look that angry.

"She complained again, at Christmas, didn't she? Derek?"

"She didn't complain."

"Honey, you're a terrible liar."

He kisses her, which is normally a good distraction. When he pulls back Addison is still looking fixedly at him so he concedes - somewhat - with a sigh. "She just asked, that's all. Expressed an interest. It's not a federal crime."

"I knew it!"

"She wants grandchildren."

"She has grandchildren coming out of her-"

"Addison," he interrupts reprovingly.

"Sorry." She doesn't look sorry, though. "But Derek, did you see how she looked at me after Kathleen announced Richie's promotion? And she asked 'does anyone _else_ have any news to share?'"

"So?"

"So she was waiting for me to say that I'm ... pregnant." The words sound strange coming out of her mouth and she pronounces them almost with wonder.

"I think that's a bit of a leap."

She folds her army crossly. "I know what she was thinking."

"The brain is _my_ specialty," he teases.

"And babies are mine." She looks past him for a moment.

"Addison, come on. Whatever you think she - look, it's our decision, not hers."

"_I _know that. Someone should tell her."

He frowns. It's not supposed to be like this with Addison and his mother, the two of them pitted against each other. Each one drawing him aside, separately. _I'm not saying she's ... I just think you should know that ... Maybe you should be the one to ... _ His sisters adore her, but...

"Addie, look, let's just - enjoy the night, okay?"

She looks up at him under her lashes, her voice silky when it slips between suddenly smiling lips. "What did you have in mind?"

He kisses her, slow, sweet, thinks about the year ahead, grateful that her sometimes quick moods mean that she's _his_ again now. "I was thinking we could wait for the others to pass out and then explore all those nooks and crannies in the house that we haven't seen yet."

"And find more problems with it..."

"The biggest problem with this house is that it's too cold for you to wear that white bathing suit." He slides his hands down the puffy down fabric covering her ams, thinking about the skin underneath it.

She arches an eyebrow at him. "And how well do you think that bikini will fit when I gain fifty pounds?"

And they're right back where they were. "Fifty?" Now it's his turn to raise an eyebrow.

"Nancy gained sixty with Jack."

"Nancy uses pregnancy as an excuse to see the world as a smorgasboard."

She laughs in spite of herself. "And Sharon gained-"

"Twins don't count."

She shrugs. "We could have twins."

He thinks of it. Two babies at once, fat and rosy and smiling.

"Derek, I want to have a baby. I do."

"Really?'

"_Yes._ Just - not now. But I do want one."

"I'm glad."

She leans against him and he rests his cheek on her fragrant hair. "I want it all: the babies, the screaming, the drool, the diapers, the stretch marks-" she glances up at him when he winces. "Oh, yeah. Haven't you seen-"

"I'm begging you not to mention one of my sisters."

She giggles.

* * *

><p>"Sleeping?"<p>

He looks up to see Dr. Bailey standing in the doorway of his office. He closes the folder of scans he's been studying, or trying to - they kept blurring in front of his eyes.

"Uh, I think so. She was awake earlier." _And then I walked out. _

"I meant you." Dr. Bailey narrows her eyes slightly, looking at him in an appraising sort of way.

"Me? No. I was - reading." He glances automatically at the clock on the wall to confirm that he didn't drift off.

"_Have_ you slept?"

"Here and there," he says, because it's true. He's a surgeon who runs efficiently on sporadic sleep, and he designs his tone to cut off further inquiry.

"I was thinking you might want to go home," Bailey continues, her tone uncharacteristically gentle even if she doesn't get - or more likely chooses to ignore - his hint.

"Home?"

_I want to go home, Derek! _

"She's going to be here for a while, Shepherd. She's out of surgery now, and her brother is here. You can get some clothes for her..."

He hadn't thought about that. But now he's thinking about it, and the idea of sifting through her things, all those delicate fabrics, the carefully encased shoes - he always felt he was intruding in her closet.

_Unwelcome memories - armfuls of silk and cashmere and rain, cold driving rain._

He's not sure he wants to face the trailer: the remoteness of it, the poignancy of retracing their last drive together. He stands up, moves to the window for a moment to gather his thoughts.

"I'm not sure if I should..."

His entreaty is familiar - but from the other side. This is what patients' families do, he knows: they resist leaving the room. No, they don't want cups of coffee or to talk to social workers or to walk down the hall with one of the nurses. They don't want to take breaks or leave their loved ones. The hospital is four walls of magical thinking: turn your back and the body in the bed might disappear. Close your eyes and they'll code. Leave the building? That's just asking for trouble.

"Her brother's here." Now Bailey fixes him with a more familiar stern look, made somehow stronger - not more comical - by the fact that she has to tilt her chin up to do it. "I'm here. She's in good hands, Shepherd."

"Dr. Bailey-"

"You have to go back sometime." Her voice is slightly more gentle again, and he can acknowledge that she's right.

This is what will happen, he knows. Her days will become more consistent and less terrifying: as her vitals remains stable and she's weaned off the pain meds, as she builds strength, as her injuries start to heal. Awake, asleep, and asleep again. He's grown accustomed to the facial damage and he's grateful the rest of the damage is, for the most part, concealed. But what Bailey is offering him - a chance to grab a fast few moments of normalcy, a chance to pack for an uncertain yet somehow mundane future at the hospital - is frightening.

He never said he was brave.

Addison is sleeping when he goes into her room. Archer's sitting by her side, sipping coffee and fiddling with a gadget that looks, from a distance, higher-tech than Derek's own blackberry. The room smells like espresso beans and medicine.

Archer glances up. "She's been out for a while."

Derek scans her with his eyes, automatically. Between the bruises she's pale and still, the sheets moving slightly with her breaths. Even asleep she feels very present in the room, her injuries a living thing. They're loud: multicolored, leaving him dry-mouthed if he studies them too closely. His job is to cut into human flesh, saw through bone, use fingers and machine to separate strands of life. Aftercare isn't in his wheelhouse, not really, and these lingering reminders of her trauma leave him distinctly uncomfortable.

_Not as uncomfortable as she is,_ a voice inside him notes. It's somewhat mocking, somewhat affectionate - it sounds, he realizes, a bit like Mark.

Not thrilled with the idea of Mark as his conscience - and uncertain whether Mark even _has _a conscience - he busies himself with Addison's chart. Doctoring fills the awkward silence of brothers-in-law who've never gotten along. Not like Addison and his sisters - he could swear by that first summer she was closer to them than he'd ever been.

"You were right."

Derek looks up from the chart, not expecting those words from this speaker. "Excuse me?"

"You were right." Archer's voice is quiet, presumably mindful of his sleeping sister, and Derek's unused to that tone from him - it sounds almost reverential.

"About what?"

Archer nods toward Addison. "The - well, her face. You know. It's not as bad when you've looked at it for a while."

Derek pauses for a moment. Archer's come through, he supposes, not having left her bedside other than to get coffee since he finally made it past the threshold. Derek supposes his brother-in-law has actually logged more bedside hours with his wife than he has, all told. Derek's in and out, quick visits between patients and after hours. That's more like normalcy, isn't it?

"They'll heal." Archer is talking even more quietly now, perhaps to himself. He reaches out as if to touch her face, then seems to stop himself. "She'll be the same."

Derek doesn't respond. It is, of course, what every patient's family wants to hear. That's they'll recover. That they'll be the same. What he never says is: no one is ever the same. He lets the nurses talk about physical therapy and the social workers talk about counseling. His job is in the OR.

"I'm going to the tr- to get some of her things." He glances at his brother-in-law; his wide eyes are paler in the flooding light and they remind him of Addison's. "I'll be back. You'll..." he trails off, not sure what he wants to say. _You'll be here? You'll be all right?_

"I'll stay."

"Thanks," he says shortly, and because a room of Montgomeries has never truly been one in which he can feel welcome, he makes short work of his exit.

He takes barely half a step outside the hospital, eyes on the ground, before he's assaulted on all sides: cold wind, overly bright sunshine, and then the sudden pop-and-click of cameras and shouts of strangers.

"Dr. Shepherd, is your wife conscious?"

"Is it true that you're considered a person of interest?"

"Is her condition still critical?"

"What did you tell the police, Dr. Shepherd?"

Someone shoves a microp\hone toward his face. Two. He's frozen, unable to move. Another rep\orter closes in, shouting above the others, a camera hefted onto his shoulder.

"Dr. Shepherd, is it true your wife was cheating on you?"

"Is he here? Is her lover here?"

"Where is he, Dr. Shepherd?"

He just stares, unable to comprehend. His car keys dangle uselessly from his hand, the safety of the parking lot seemingly miles away.

"Dr. Shepherd, are you a suspect in your wife's attack?"

Another voice, familiar this time, cuts in, breaking his frozen state.

"He's not answering questions right now. Move back and let us through. _Move back._" Then he feels an arm across his back, pulling him, the phalanx of reporters breaks and only then can he take a gulp of cold, fresh air.

"Jesus, they're like animals - give me your keys, Derek."

"I'm fine, I'm-"

"Just give me your keys." Fumbling, he hands them over and lets Mark lead him through the parking lot.

He climbs awkwardly into the p\assenger seat of the jeep, staring at his own feet so he won't have to acknowledge the knot of reporters still watching them from the entrance of the hospital. He can't remember the last time he was in this car without being behind the wheel.

Mark sniffs the air as he pulls the seatbelt across his chest. "It's ripe in here. You forget to wash your scrubs or something?"

Only then does Derek notice the smell - he was driving too fast, too frightened the night he got the call, but now the odor is everywhere, earthy and unpleasant. He is reminded against his will of Christmas Eve, the way she felt slipping through his hands in the parking lot. He hadn't reached her in time

_You're never here when I need you! _

and by the time he crouched down by her side, pulled her hair away from her face, she'd already lost much of what she'd drank at Joe's on the icy pavement. But thinking of that icy pavement makes him shudder involuntarily at the idea of Addison on that pavement only a few hours later. He thinks instead of piling into his jeep, the sour stench of vomit mixing with the chemical smell of the heat.

He mumbles directions, stares out the frosty front window. Mark fiddles with the controls, mutters something about how much he dislikes this car - Derek remembers that; he always considered it something of a point of pride. Even when he was designated driver in the Hamptons Mark usually refused to drive the jeep on principle.

Now Derek studies Mark's hands on the steering wheel. They're big, larger than his, the source of a fair amount of brotherly ribbing over the years. Derek was there when they cut into a cadaver for the first time, and into a live patient. He remembers the first patient Mark saved, and the first one he lost. Those hands would help Derek, with terribly cliched pathos, at all the masculine tasks their fatherless house demanded: Fixing the leaky pipes under the sink. Packing Kathleen up for college. Building the treehouse Amy demanded. He thinks of Mark's hand clapping him on the back at his wedding - their _best man_ - and then he sees his hands on his wife, all over her, and he's nauseated. He jabs at the window.

"Hey." Mark glances over. "What are you-"

"It's hot," Derek says irrationally, still trying to get the window open. Mark gives him a curious look, then cracks the window from his side.

"Better?"

Derek takes a welcome breath of fresh air, doesn't answer. He doesn't want Mark opening his windows and driving his car, doesn't want to need his protection from the press or his friendship. He wants to remember what it felt like to open his bedroom door - open it all the way, because they didn't even _close_ it - and feel his world fall apart. He wants to nurse the betrayal, nurture it like the living thing it is. Giving it up feels like falling. Addison may be helpless now, Addison may need him, but he'll be damned if he needs Mark back.

"So ... this is where you live." There's no question mark, just Mark's lifted brow as he surveys the trailer and its environs.

Mark has a tank-commander's ability to follow driving directions; it's always irked him. Derek snapped the bare minimum at him but Mark pulled seamlessly up the lakefront drive with barely a follow-up question.

"I own the land," he says automatically, as they park.

Mark just shakes his head as he walks toward the Airstream. "I can't see Addison in a trailer."

"Neither can she," Derek blurts before he can stop himself, annoyed when Mark gives him a knowing smile. He doesn't want to be _known_.

"Look, Mark, I'm -" he pauses at the trailer, a hand on the door, and Mark nods.

"I'll wait out here."

"Thanks," he mutters, hesitating, and Mark waves a hand at him in response. "I mean, thanks for-"

"Just do what you need to do," Mark says gruffly and Derek is grateful because he doesn't want to be appreciative, doesn't want to feel anything for this man who ruined his life. These moments of peace unnerve him, make him think of things he wants to ignore. So he pushes the door open and by the time he's closed it behind him he can see through the window that Mark has settled in one of the chairs on the trailer's deck and is rooting around casually in the cooler. He comes up with a beer and examines the label. Derek shakes his head. Mark's always been comfortable - maybe too comfortable - in Derek's space. In his life.

Inside the trailer he has to take a minute to catch his breath.

The stale air hits him; no one's been in the trailer since Christmas Eve, since he slammed the door behind him on the way to the hospital. That long-ago ride when he wasn't sure if Addison was alive or -

But he won't think about it. He sits on the bed, lets his head fall into his hands.

His promises to the contrary, Addison might as well be here, her absence as fulsome as her presence in the achingly small space. She's marked it all now: here's where she knelt to tug open the overhead cabinets, complaining about closet space while he tried to ignore the view; here's where she stomped the inches from stove to fridge, making coffee more loudly than she needed to while he pretended to be asleep; and there's where she stood, covering her tears with her hands, on Christmas Eve.

_So it does include me?_

_That's not what I said._

That could have been the last time they spoke.

But "could" is a dangerous word. She _could_ have been killed - but she wasn't. He _could_ have told her he loved her - but he didn't. He _could_ let his guilt swallow him whole now until the only thing left is this gaping wound of a trailer, his broken wife, the bits and pieces of their life together shed along the way.

His head pounds. There's moisture behind his eyes, a fuzziness to his thoughts, but he doesn't cry. He focuses instead on action. Emotions are messy, so he takes it step by step: cut, suture, close.

Like Dr. Bailey said, he just needs to grab a few things. Shirts. Soft pants. Underthings.

Simple.

But nothing is simple and he can't do anything quickly, it seems. He opens two drawers before he can touch anything and then he's back in the brownstone, rain and anger pounding the leaded windows as he scoops armfuls of her clothes and pretends she's not tearing down the stairs after him.

Some of them were still wrapped in dry-cleaning plastic; he remembers this. She used to be fastidious about removing it, get on the housekeeper's case about it and his too and even in that moment - _my wife my best friend my bed my god - _the plastic stood out to him and he almost asked her about it. _Were you too busy fucking Mark to remember that it's a potential carcinogen? _What other toxins had she let into their bedroom? She cried so hard that night that tears lost meaning and he just stood there absorbing them along with the rain. When he finally left-

_I'm going to go, you stay_

-and padded down the stoop his heel caught on something chiffon and delicate. Whatever it was ripped as he walked, as he shook it away from his dress shoes. He had to close it off, you see, to make the drive across the country. To clear his head. He listened to the first few messages and then he started deleting them along with his memories. It worked right up until she walked back into his life looking determined, admittedly beautiful and anything but sorry.

He is thirty-nine years old. He's lived in four states. And she is everywhere.

A knock at the window interrupts his thoughts. Mark's familiar scruffy face fills up the space. _You okay? _he mouths. Derek nods slowly, but as soon as Mark's face disappears he sinks down onto the bed again. There's something about retracing his steps that's both vaguely comforting and terribly painful. Here's where he sat, in his pajamas, waiting for her to get out of the shower. He remembers vividly the way she tumbled from the small bathroom in a cloud of steam. Remembers the way her hair felt, warm and wet, through the thick terrycloth as he sopped up some of the water.

_So it does include me?_

_I didn't say that._

He rests his head in his hands, lets the sharp points of his elbows on his thighs ground him. Wonders how differently things might have played out if he'd answered differently. If he'd given her what she wanted.

The ringing phone startles him. For a moment he just stares, waits for his fingers to remember how to answer, to pretend that this - that anything - is normal.

"Derek, I'm so sorry."

Richard. He mumbles acceptance into the phone.

"The press officer caught up with me, I was meeting with - look, some of it's to be expected, a pretty surgeon attacked on Christmas Eve-"

Derek winces at _attacked_, wants to say _handle me with kid gloves_ and is embarrassed with the thought.

"-but we're adding security and we'll take care of it. Call me on the way back, we're going to take you through the private entrance and you won't have to deal with it."

He wonders if there's some way he won't have to deal with any of this. Looks longingly at the jeep parked outside of the trailer. Once he climbed into it and drove away from everything he knew. Left it all behind. Would he ever do it again?

"Derek, are you there?"

"I'm here." He looks down at the hands he now feels are useless. His fingers are wound around a pair of silk pajamas. Has he even seen these before?

"Drive carefully," Richard says, like a father, and Derek has to swallow hard when he disconnects the call.

He's bad at this, at women's clothing, at comforting - himself or Addison, or hell, even Mark - and he's the only one here, inside this airless trailer that somehow felt like freedom when he bought it. He remembers Addison storing extra clothing in weatherproof tubs, on the porch. He only let her bring her things in piecemeal, doling out shelf space with what now feels like cruel precision.

He takes a deep breath. He can do this. Shirts, pants, underthings.

It would be easier if her clothes were just clothes, but they're not. Like everything else about her, about what remains of their marriage, it's complicated - maybe more so than it needs to be. The silky pajamas that slide through his fingers make him think of a hundred lazy mornings, of cheating on the Sunday crossword puzzle together in bed, her satin thighs dusted with croissant crumbs, of Christmas morning at his mother's house when his nieces and nephews would burst into his childhood bedroom, leap onto the bed between them to alert them that Santa had arrived. He tries to find some soft t-shirts but the old Columbia one makes him think of med school, of Addison throwing her hat at him instead of in the air, laughing. He hesitates because most of her clothing seems terribly impractical for a hospital bed: dresses of stiff crepe or wool, fragile chiffon things that flutter, those tight knee length skirts she favors and even he can admit she wears like no one else.

He needs to get out of there. Finally he grabs a pair of his own sweats - she used to wear them sometimes, lamenting her ability to fit into them, and he'd always assure her how much better they looked on her - and a couple of his shirts.

"You get what you need?" Mark asks as they walk to the car and Derek hefts the duffel higher on his shoulder and pretends it's a question deserving of a simple _yes._

He and Mark part in the lobby almost like friends. Mark's operating tomorrow, he remembers, and he takes off for some sleep. Derek stashes the duffel in his office and glances at the clock automatically. He's on his way to see Addison when his pager goes off.

"Derek, you feel up to operating?"

"Yes," he says immediately.

New Year's Eve. Chief Herman, in New York, used to call it Accident's Eve for this reason - alcohol, merriment, poor judgment, icy weather - it was the perfect storm for an emergency room and particularly for neuro.

"Can you just-"

"I'll check on Addison," Richard says, anticipating his words.

It's late when he scrubs out, the surgery a success. At least he can do something, and yet he feels as impotent as ever as he massages a crick in his neck. The wall clock tells him it's almost midnight. Almost next year.

As he changes, he tries to remember New Year's last year but finds he can't. Did he miss it? What else has he missed?

Archer glances up at him as he enters Addison's room. "She's sleeping," he says quietly. "She was - she was in pain, before, I paged her team. They gave her something."

He looks down at his sister fondly, then back to Derek.

"Happy New Year."

Derek looks sharply at him but can't discern anything beyond exhaustion in his tone. He nods in response, then glances at the clock.

Twelve-sixteen.

Why does it sound like time of death?

Addison stirs then, and Archer touches her good shoulder lightly. "Addie?"

She opens bleary eyes and Derek moves in closer. "Hey."

"Hi." She starts to smile, remembers her stitches, gives him a lopsided half smile. "Happy - Happy New Year, honey."

The word _honey _twinges. Maybe he's not the only one; Archer looks away.

"Happy New Year, Addison." He kisses her cheek. It's hard to believe the year has actually started, that those peculiar limbo days between Christmas and New Year's have finally come to a close. There's something surreal about those days, lazy for some and hectic for others but for everyone existing in some no-man's-land between normal and new. Even now as he stands by his wife's hospital bed, their lives nothing like they were on Christmas Eve, he wonders what this new year will bring. He looks down at Addison.

Her expression is soft, not fully awake. He pats her good arm. "It's late. Go back to sleep."

"Archer..."

"I'm right here." Her brother takes her hand and she tilts her chin, slightly, focusing on him.

"You should - go, Archie. You came all the way out - you should get some rest."

"Are you sure?"

"Please." She makes that half-smile at him. "I'll see you tomorrow?"

"Of course you will. Bye, Addie. Happy, um - well, I'll see you in the morning." He kisses her forehead.

Derek sits down in the seat his brother-in-law vacated, takes a moment to settle himself. Addison is looking at him, eyes still open.

"You're not tired?"

"No." Her breath is raspy but even. "I slept, before."

"I heard you were in pain."

"No - yeah, well, not really, but you know how Archie is."

He frowns. "Addison, you need to be open with the team about this."

"Derek..."

"You heard what Bailey said."

"I can manage."

"You have to let them manage for you."

"You know what?" She looks right at him and he remembers, with a punch in the gut, how passive-aggressive she can be. "I think I'm tired after all. Good night, Derek."

"Addison..."

She closes her eyes, folding her good hand neatly over her uninjured leg, and takes an exaggerated deep breath. _Damn it._

He's thinking sleep might not be the worst idea in the world. He heads for the nearest on-call room, thinking he'll snag an extra pillow for the cot in his office.

"Sorry, I didn't know anyone was-"

It's Meredith, her face still slightly puffy from sleep.

She's tying her hair back, and he trains his eyes away from the line of her neck. There is nowhere in this hospital he can go, it seems, without facing his mistakes, without the constant reminder of his failings. Meredith looks small and still tired in clean blue scrubs. Vaguely he wonders if she's been home, and when. That big gingerbread house where he'd indulged his fantasies of a new life. He knows he'd be less than welcome there now, but can't help wondering if there's anything of him left there.

"What?" she asks and he realizes he's staring.

He shakes his head.

"Are you - okay?" she asks tentatively.

He opens his mouth to tell her he's fine, then decides he's too tired for lies. He meets her gaze silently instead then, finally, shrugs in what he's embarrassed to admit is an appropriately helpless manner.

"It's January first," she says, and she's doing that thing he's seen Addison and his sisters do to tighten their hair, he supposes, grabbing two halves of the ponytail and tugging. It's an unfortunate gesture though, just reminds him of his own hands grabbing that hank of hair, pulling.

_What is the matter with you? _

He rubs the bridge of his nose, thinks he's more tired than he's been willing to admit. He should sleep. He should do something. He thinks of all he doesn't know _about what happened in New York_, about what happened to Addison. He's tired of not asking questions that no one wants to answer anyway, tired of silent fear and fearful silence and the way the plastic chair at Addison's bedside digs into the backs of his thighs. He's tired of everything and he thinks he could sink onto the thin mattress in this room and lose himself to sleep. Maybe wake up a better man. One who isn't watching Meredith leave - except she's not leaving, she's paused. His mouth dries slightly.

With one hand still on the doorknob, Meredith turns back to him. "Do you ever feel like the days between Christmas and New Year don't really count? Like it all starts after January first?"

He stares, because she's just put into words how he's been feeling. "Yeah. I do know that feeling."

She doesn't blink. "Derek..."

And then suddenly he's crossed the distance between them and her lips are opening under his, still familiar, his fingers tangling in her hair and his other hand pulling her against him, seeking her warmth.

"Derek. _Derek_!" Both her small hands are on his chest then, pushing. Hard.

He takes a step back. She's glaring at him, draws the back of her hand across her mouth.

"What the hell are you doing?"

"I - I'm sorry," he stammers.

"Derek, I'm not that person, okay? I told you, I can't be. Your wife - just had surgery. A few hours ago I was _literally _washing her blood off my hands, Derek, please don't do this, you can't _kiss _me right now."

He feels cold all over, knows the exquisite pain of being unable to take back a mistake, and then he sees the expression in her eyes change and a cold dread washes over him. He follows her gaze toward the door.

Just when he thought things couldn't get worse.

Mark and Archer are standing next to each other, framed in the open doorway, and he's not sure which one of them looks angrier.

Time stands still for a moment and then it's Archer who speaks, in that cold Montgomery-voice he knows all too well, his words all the more cutting for their seeming neutrality.

"Your wife is looking for you."

* * *

><p><em>Reviews are warmly welcomed and greatly appreciated.<em>


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